Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Joel Stucki" <joel AT stucki.ws>]

> Joel, while I agree with you in looking to inspiration, I disagree with
> you that it is only on this basis that we can know any details about
> Abraham. Even if we leave inspiration, faith etc out of the equation, in
> Genesis (let's limit this discussion to chapter 12 and following) we
> still have a document which purports to be the ancient history of the
> people of Israel, from Abraham onwards. I agree that (apart from faith)
> we cannot know for certain how well this document corresponds to the
> actual facts about the past. But nothing significant in it has been
> shown to be wrong e.g. by archaeology, and indeed the general picture of
> life in Canaan and Egypt has been confirmed. The normal scholarly

Yes Peter I agree with you.There is nothing about archeological finds
that makes the account impossible. And there is much we can learn
about the world in which Abraham would have lived. Comparing cultural
data in the Tanakh with known cultural information from the time can
be a useful way to help test the validity of the story and even put
some things in context. However data is sparse and there is nothing
outside the Tanakh to attest to the people and events it describes
from these early periods, therefore drawing more detail about events
than what is disclosed in the text is impossible. The specific
question here was language development from the time of Abraham. There
is just simply no source to draw from to reconstruct this type of
data. The same could be said about the lengthy recent discussion about
Jacob's daughters.

Joel Stucki