Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 6/29/06, dwashbur AT nyx.net wrote:

> > Can you:
> >
> > 1) Give an example of such scholars who use the "late" date of the Bible to
> > make linguistic conclusions on the similarity of Hebrew, Aramaic, Moabite,
> > Ugaritic, and Akkadian?
>
> At the moment, no.  ... But for starters, most of the so-called minimalists 
> take
> such an approach.

Well, let's limit scholars to linguists.  Perhaps you may look to whether
scholars such as Philip Davies make such uses in the recent book by
Ian Young? (See here: http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/JHS/reviews/review180.htm )
(I don't know.  I had a very general reading of parts of the book.)

> > 2) Explain how come this conclusion -- that Hebrew was a development of
> > Canaanite -- came to be accepted in a time when it was the scholarly
> > consensus that the Patriarchal narratives were historical?
>
> Can you give some examples of this?

Well, having mentioned Saenz-Badillos, he writes that "The classical study
of the development of the various Northwest Semitic dialects is Z.S. Harris's
_Development_of_the_Canaanite_dialects._" (p. 45)  I haven't read that study
but I'm making some reasonable assumptions here: 1) this study does
suggest Hebrew is a 1st millenium development of earlier Canaanite/Ugaritic.
2) During the mid 20th century, the scholarly consensus was that the
Patriarchal Narratives were historical.  3) Scholars who formed the scholarly
consensus in (2) readily accepted the conclusions of Harris including (1).

> > 3) Give an example of specific linguistic phenomena that could be understood
> > as ancient and prior/concurrent with such languages as Ugaritic or Amarna
> > Canaanite?
>
> See number 1 above, but a good place to start would be M. Dahood's works.  In
> fact, his commentary on the Psalms in the Anchor series caused a firestorm
> because of the way he used Ugaritic to challenge some of the more common
> linguistic assumptions about Hebrew.

Ok, so just to be clear: By scholars I meant mainly linguists, and by
an example,
I meant one that isn't going to be criticized for using unsound methodology 
like
one review of Dahood's work mentioned above does.  See here:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-9231(196612)85%3A4%3C484%3AABPI1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B

Yitzhak Sapir
http://toldot.blogspot.com