Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <bill.rea AT canterbury.ac.nz>]

James asked:

>> Do you have any evidence for this? As far as I am aware we don't have any
>> Hebrew manuscripts dated to that age (wish we did) and this line of
>> 'evidence' merely furnishes new issues for debate.

Karl responded:
 
> No we don?t have any manuscripts that old (were it that we do) but we do
> have documents from other cultures, and they have revealed literary formulae
> that appear in Genesis, but not in later books. One of them is that the
> title and author of a document was listed at the end of the document, not at
> the beginning.

Its not particularly clear that these tolodoth formulas were intended to be
titles. In their current structure, where they end a section, they aren't
all that different in function to the concluding formulas in 2 Kings. For
example 2 Kings 12:19

19: And the rest of the acts of Joash, and all that he did, are they not
written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?

Secondly some of these formulas, if read as a title, can be validly read as
opening a section. For example, after the formulaic start of verse Gen 10:1
one has precisely what one would expect of a listing of generations from the
sons of Noah. Also Gen 25:12 has a formulaic opening and then proceeds to
list the descendants of Ishmael. For those who reject the source hypotheses,
of whatever form, Gen 2:4 can still be read either way.

If the literary structure they are supposed to copying had both title and
author, it is curious that none of the Biblical formulas indicate an author.

In short, I think the evidence for this claim of an old literary structure
is rather weak.


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