Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Dear Philip Brown,

Sorry for responding so late.  I just noticed your message has made it
to my spam box for some reason.  No idea why.

You took exception to what I wrote:
> " you need to adopt the strategies of scholarship.  ...  After taking all
> the inscriptions and fitting them together and seeing how they make up a
> reasonable linguistic scenario, one can take the language of the Bible and
> see where it fits in this picture.  Finally, after all this, one can take
> the claims made by the Bible and see how, in light of the picture that we
> have created of the linguistic development, the events described in the
> Bible can be understood.  In the process, claims must be proven.  "would",
> "could", "maybe", "circumstantially" are not good enough and only lead
> toward a process of creating hypothetical but unlikely scenarios."

And wrote:
> This form of scholarly strategy has been standard in critical biblical
> scholarship for the last 150 years. And it is this strategy that frequently
> causes critical scholarship to operate schizophrenically: critical
> scholarship often argues strenuously for the validity of its conclusions
> because they are based on the extant evidence and at the same time it is
> ready to discard its conclusions the moment evidence becomes extant that
> adjusts its understanding of the ANE's linguistics, history, sociology, and
> so on.

And if the Hittite example I am about to quote is proved wrong or misguided,
are you ready to abandon this characterization of the critical method?

> The trail of critical biblical scholarship is littered with the remains of
> discarded "assured results of scientific study," many of which declared this
> or that datum of Scripture to be  ridiculous, impossible, or completely
> unfounded (= no evidence was extant to support it).  E.g., the existence of
> a people group referred to in Scripture as Hittites was once roundly denied
> by critical scholarship. Once evidence became extant to support the biblical
> data, the critical scholarly conclusion was discarded, but no change in
> strategy is made.

It is interesting that you use this point right after Yigal made some comments
against this identification:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/b-hebrew/2006-June/028803.html
Another link you might find interesting to read is here:
http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/dm.cgi?action=msg&f=1&t=151&m=1

> The possibility that biblical data should be included as
> evidence in formulating conclusions is rigorously rejected.

This is a misrepresentation of scholarship.  Scholars use biblical data to
formulate conclusions.  But dating the text is a problematic issue.  Just like
an ancient record that describes event 1000 years prior to its composition in
either legendary or down-to-earth terms would not be accepted as evidence
so too the Bible cannot be accepted as evidence for events centuries prior to
its composition.  However, when was it composed?  The only thing we know
for sure is that many books had been composed by the late centuries BCE.
Today, we can also point to an amulet that contains a couple of verses from
two different parts of the Pentateuch in the 6th century BCE.  Given an
artifact, an archaeologist or epigrapher dates it on the basis of the
stratigraphy where it was found or on the basis of paleography.  Given the
Bible, other (literary) techniques must be utilized.  Can the book of Kings
provide us accurate information about the era of Solomon if it was written
no earlier than the 6th century BCE and Solomon lived four centuries prior
to that?  A scholar must answer these questions.  He may utilize the fact
that an Hezekiah narrative may be discerned to suggest that some parts
of the book of Kings were written much earlier (8th century BCE) or he may
point to some uniformity in the way the book prepares the reader for Josiah
to suggest a late but still pre-exilic date or he may suggest that the book
was written much later than the 6th century.  But he must first argue the
dating of the book before going on to use it for historical reconstruction.
With a dating in hand, he can use the Biblical information to possibly
reconstruct some historical conclusions of the era of its composition.  His
conclusions will only be as strong as his dating so the arguments for the
dating must be sound.   But at the end of the day, the Biblical information is
utilized, just not in the way you would like it to be utilized.

> At base, this strategy constantly forgets how meager the store of evidence
> really is. If we focus merely upon the diachronic development of Semitic
> languages, at best we can conjecture only lines of development and
> relationships between the score of languages we know existed in the 2nd
> millennium Levant. "Could," "maybe," and "seems" reflect the appropriate
> mood in our positive assertions about ANE inter-linguistic relationships.

I am not sure how linguistics got into this.  Linguistics is a different topic
from historiography and its premises are strong and its conclusions are not
"could" or "maybe" or "seems".  One does not use "probably" or "could"
in discussing the genetic relationship between Hebrew and Arabic, but the
absence of any such discernable relationship between Hebrew and Indo-
European.  Also, the Bible does not generally make linguistic claims.  Such
claims, when they are found (for example, )i$ and )i$$ah sounding similar, or
the $ibboleth story or the relationship of Aramaic to "Judaean") must still be
considered in light of its time and is also too meager for fruitful linguistic
reconstruction (except when used in conjunction with much more extra-
Biblical evidence).  And then, it provides only a small tidbit of information
linguistically.

> The exclusion of biblical claims regarding the ANE when compiling one's
> evidential base is, I believe, methodologically irresponsible. Their
> inclusion will by no means answer all our questions. On the other hand, the
> privileging of extra-biblical evidence over biblical evidence is, all faith
> apart, not scholarly.

Extra-biblical evidence is not priviliged except in the sense that we have 
more
secure ways to date the evidence and therefore make conclusions.

> If it is scientific-method-type scholarship we aim for, then all evidence
> should be weighed, hypotheses formulated, and then theories constructed
> which best account for all current evidence. Yet at the end of the day we
> must confess our theories to be theories, nothing more.

But all evidence was weighed, and hypotheses were formulated.  The evidence
for Biblical archaeology as you had presented it has been found wanting.

Yitzhak Sapir
http://toldot.blogspot.com