Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 7/14/06, Karl Randolph wrote:

> > I am not dealing here with the issue of borrowing from
> > Enuma Elish, since this is not the position I hold or have
> > suggested on list.  However, the second sentence presents
> > a logical fallacy.  If we have two documents, and we can
> > definitely date one a thousand years earlier than the second,
> > this provides evidence that the first one is the older account
> > or document.
>
> This works only if we have the originals of the documents.
>
> But when one deals with copies, that all goes out the window.

No it does not.  The physical dating is evidence.  You may suggest
an otherwise unsupported assumption that the two are copies of
documents whose dating is different from those of the copies.  But
unless you find evidence to support that assumption, it remains
an assumption without any evidence to support it.  The physical
dating remains real tangible evidence.

> For example, the oldest copies of the New Testament that we have,
> complete copies, date from the fourth century AD, the oldest copy of
> the Odessy dates from the eighth century AD. According to your
> argument, the New Testament is older than Homer.

We actually have earlier fragments of parts of the New Testament and
earlier fragments of the Odyssey:
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/texts/manuscripts.html
http://www.chs.harvard.edu/publications.sec/homer_and_the_papyri.ssp/introduction.pg

But I don't know why you raised this argument when I provided a
comparable argument: "For example, we can argue on linguistic grounds
that although our copies of the Zoroastrian Gathas are late, they predate
the Old Persian inscriptions."  In this case, the Gathas vs. Old Persian,
while we do not have physical evidence, we have linguistic evidence.  The
language of the Gathas dates earlier than Old Persian.  Without the
physical evidence mentioned above for the Odyssey and the New
Testament, a similar argument could probably be proposed based on
linguistics of Greek.

Physical dating provides evidence.  Linguistics provides evidence.
But you need to have some evidence!  The above suggestion is that
an argument based on an assumption with no evidence to support it
is better than one that has evidence to support it.  This is simply
wrong.

> > ....  We may argue that the two are copies
> > themselves of older documents and it is possible that the
> > second one is older than the first.  However, that argument
> > would be made on pure speculative grounds.
>
> Not necessarily. It is speculation to say that the copies of Tanakh
> that we have from Qumran are not copies, in that the documents
> themselves claim to earlier authorship and tradition claims that no
> book of Tanakh was authored later than the time of Ezra.

Which tradition?  The Samaritan tradition might very well claim that all
of the Hebrew Bible, including the Jewish version of the Pentateuch
dates from no earlier than Ezra (I don't know if it does or does not.  It
is an educated guess).  No one suggests that the Qumranic
documents, at least most of them, are not copies.  But the question
is, just how ancient is the original, and how close are they to the
original.  It is pure unsupported speculation to claim that they date
from a thousand years earlier.  But the point was not to argue the
Mosaic or second millenium authorship of parts of the Bible.  It was
to point out the problems with your logical argument: An argument
from evidence, be it physical or linguistic or other, is always better
than an argument absent any evidence.

> We don't know if the copy of Enuma Elish found in Babylon is a copy or
> original. If original, it is definitely a later document than Genesis
> 1.

Do you have evidence for this?  Were did you get this "definitely"?

> > While the above is technically correct, because we have
> > relatively few religious literary texts from Canaan and
> > Phoenician sources themselves, we do have sources from
> > Ugarit which is relatively similar.  But even without such
> > evidence, we would simply not know whether or not there
> > was a Canaanite god or goddess Tehom.
>
> So you admit that the existence of such a goddess is pure
> speculation.

No, it is an educated guess.  Most scholars don't even differentiate
between Ugaritic myth and Canaanite.  Recent scholars may
have been more accurate and precise on this point.  But even if
Ugaritic myth cannot be considered "Canaanite" proper, it is
definitely very similar, and allows a more accurate picture of
the ancient Canaanite beliefs than the Bible might suggest.
What I wrote above is that without such sources, the existence
*AND* non-existence of such a goddess would be speculation.
However, on the basis of Akkadian Tiamat compared with
Biblical Tehom, we could propose this also for Canaanite.  It
would be an educated guess: speculation, but not pure
speculation.  Keep in mind, though, we do have those sources!

> > > > Gen 49:25 The parallelism $mym/thwm immediately
> > > > follows )l )byk/$dy, which is clearly a divine
[...]
> Go back and read the text, in Hebrew. While the text is poetic in
> format, $MYM and THWM are not in parallel with $DY and )L, rather the
> sentence structure puts them in the object phrases of the verb, while
> $DY and )L are the subject. Not parallel at all. If you want to
> divinize heavens and depths, then to be consistent you need to
> divinize breasts and womb, in the same verse.

And if you go back and read the verse you'll see that Tehom receives
a verb "rbct" which suggests a creature rather than an abstract or
immobile natural element.  It is unclear in this verse whether Tehom is
to be divinized as in the previous parallelism which mentions divine
elements or not, as in the following one.  It is stuck in the middle of the
two.  This is why I said some verses are ambiguous as to their
meaning, whether they mean a divine entity or a creature or a natural
force of nature.  I meant this verse, among others, as an ambiguous
one, but I see now that it wasn't clear from what I wrote.  In this context,
the verb "rbct" is still important, though.  Also, you are going out of your
way to show how they aren't parallel which doesn't really help you much.
It doesn't matter that one is an object and one is a subject: In one the
blessings are of Shadday/)el )abika, and in the other they are of
Shamayim and Tehom.

Yitzhak Sapir
http://toldot.blogspot.com