Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 7/1/06, dwashbur AT nyx.net wrote:
> Harris wrote this book in 1939, so it's questionable how much he actually knew
> about Ugaritic since the site wasn't discovered until 1929 and the language
> deciphered some time afterward.
>
> 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.
>
> No idea whether this assumption is accurate or not, since I haven't read the
> book either.

I am reading the book now.  While he does not seem to deal directly with
Hebrew in the Bible, he deals with various inscriptions to which various 
Hebrew
inscriptions discovered until then are related.

> > 2) During the mid 20th century, the scholarly consensus was that the
> > Patriarchal Narratives were historical.
>
> I'm not sure where this came from, but my reading has suggested just the
> opposite.

An essay on the Patriarchal Narratives and the consensus which dates the
consensus to around 1960 and mentions scholars such as Albright and Bright
is at http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/epn_4_selman.html

> 3) Scholars who formed the scholarly
> > consensus in (2) readily accepted the conclusions of Harris including (1).

> There again, it's questionable how many of those scholars had read Harris.
> Without a fairly extensive survey of the relevant literature, it's impossible 
> to say.

In that vein, see the review of Harris' book by Albright (I am also
only able to
access the first page from here):
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0279(194009)60%3A3%3C414%3ADOTCDA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0

For a more detailed answer, I will have to make a trip to the library.
So this is
basically the best I can do until then.  I will also further
investigate the third point of
your post when I get a chance to get to the library, and I also don't
know when that
will be.

Yitzhak Sapir
http://toldot.blogspot.com