Biblical Hebrew Forum

[JimStinehart AT aol.com]

Shoshanna: 
You raise an interesting issue.  You see the entire Torah as being very old.  
Many secular scholars see the entire  Torah as having been composed very 
late. 
My own view differs dramatically from each of those views.  I myself see the 
Patriarchal narratives  as being much older than the rest of the Bible.  In 
particular, I see the Patriarchal  narratives as having been composed many 
centuries before the composition of what  is now Genesis 1: 1 – 11: 25. 
So I myself look at the Patriarchal narratives largely independently from  
the rest of the Bible.  I see the  Patriarchal narratives as coming straight 
out 
of the mid-14th century  BCE, whereas most of the rest of the Bible is 700 or 
more years later than  that. 
One consequence of my view is that I do not rely much on the first 10  
chapters of Genesis in analyzing the last 40 chapters of Genesis. 
I am not trying to change your point of view.  I am just explaining why the 
question of  whether the author of the Patriarchal narratives used a 6-month “
year” may be an  independent issue that has little or nothing to do with how 
the first 10  chapters of Genesis view such questions. 
In fact, I have found that my attempts to assert the very old nature of  the 
Patriarchal narratives are generally rejected out of hand by secular  
scholars, on a false basis.  They  point to aspects of the first 10 chapters 
of 
Genesis that they view as being  late and mythological.  In my  opinion, that 
has 
nothing to do, one way or the other, with how old and  historically accurate 
the 
Patriarchal narratives may be. 
Jim Stinehart 
Evanston, Illinois



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