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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Circularity and other issues of logic

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew list <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Circularity and other issues of logic
  • Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 12:18:45 +0100

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/





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