Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

Dear Harold,

I really want to thank you for your references.  However, I would like
to request that
when the link is to an external site, it is not necessary to quote at
length.  It means
I might put off replying to you because of the necessity of reading through 
your
entire mail, and hence, that I might end up not reading any of the
information you
quote.  It also makes it harder for me to follow your own argument
because it is
within all lengthy sections.

I have, however, looked through the sources you provided.  They are
all problematic
in one way or another, it seems to me.  Thus, Hoover's page is dated almost a
century, but you can read it in full here:
http://www.farlang.com/gemstones/agricola-metallica/page_457/view
The other pages are not dependable for accuracy, and I tend not to
accept arguments
by those with novel new theories about Egyptian pyramid architecture
that are not
subject to peer review (by Egyptologists, in this case), such as Keith 
Squires.
So Keith Squires' article is not "good."  It is good maybe if you want
to make a
certain point, but I have no way of checking up on his facts, nor do I know 
how
qualified he is to make those conclusions.

I suggest you carefully read through the books I provided.  Jane Waldbaum's
article on the coming of iron in particular -
http://books.google.com/books?id=AjUy9SA3vqcC&pg=PA27
Look through p. 30-31.  Consider that Jane Waldbaum is an experienced
archaeologist with a long history of research into ancient metallurgy of the
area, and her article and the book was reviewed and published in standard
scholarly fashion.  Her article is a good article.

Again, the issue is not simply the way the word is used, or whether Moses
could use the word, but what kind of cultural background is implied by the
various uses of the word.  Gen 4:22 mentions smithing of both bronze and
iron, but Num 35 mentions only iron as a metal for weapons.  When it is
clear that such battles as the battle of Kadesh were fought mainly using
bronze weapons, and when bronze   It also makes no point to hypothesize
that iron did not survive when several centuries later it does survive, and
which still leaves us with no answer as to why Num 35 does not mention
bronze when many bronze weapons are known from the period.  It also
ignores the fact that the evidence is not simply the iron and bronze
weapons themselves but also the furnaces and bloomeries.  Consider
also the interesting detail provided by Waldbaum at the top of p. 30:
"... the use of nickle-rich iron ... seems to die out after the thirteenth
century ... [which] could mean ... that metalworkers were abandoning
meteoritic iron as they became more familiar with smelting techniques
..."  (I heavily summarized here to provide the interesting information,
but other possibilities of interpretation remain and only much more
analysis will allow a firm conclusion either way).

So, attempting to explain this by the loss of evidence the way the
lack of inscriptions is explained is rather simplistic and does not
allow for a comprehensive explanation of the evidence that is
available.

Yitzhak Sapir