Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 16/07/2006 05:20, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:
> ...
>
> 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.
>
>   
A surviving example of some text is evidence of dating only if there is 
good reason to believe that the surviving example is the original, or a 
copy made very soon after the original. There may be good reason for 
believing this if the text is something like a personal letter which is 
unlikely to have been copied. But when the text is religious and/or 
folklore material as we have been discussing here, there is no reason to 
assume that we have the original composition and every reason to think 
that we have a later copy. Therefore the date of the example gives us 
only the latest possible date of composition, and tells us nothing at 
all about how much earlier it might have been composed. For that you 
need to look at other evidence, mostly the content of the text - and be 
aware that a copy may have been updated in some way from the original 
composition.
...
> ... 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. ...

If we are talking about the sectarian documents, the evidence that their 
original date of composition is not thousands of years earlier is based 
on their content, not the age of the surviving copies. If we are talking 
about the biblical texts found at Qumran, their existence tells us 
nothing at all about the date of composition of these texts - except 
that it must be before about 66 CE. Maybe it is speculation to date 
these to the second millennium BCE, but it is no more speculative than 
it was before these copies were discovered. The existence of late copies 
of a document tells us absolutely nothing.

--
Peter Kirk
E-mail:  peter AT qaya.org
Blog:    http://speakertruth.blogspot.com/
Website: http://www.qaya.org/