Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>]

Moderators,

You got rid of Jim for making too many tenuous assumptions. (Also he 
tended to give bogus etymologies in order to identify certain Hebrew and 
Egyptian place-names.) His theory was that Ezra altered the text to turn 
northern references into southern ones. (Not something wildly 
implausible on its face, just lacking in evidence.)

What replaced Jim's theory as the dominant topic of the list was a 
theory saying that Genesis was written by many of the characters who 
appear in it, beginning with Adam (or, excuse me, with God). I don't 
think I need to start listing the hundreds of tenuous assumptions 
involved in this hypothesis, but they must include a very young earth, 
an incredibly fast spread and differentiation of human populations and 
cultures, and Hebrew as the mother of all languages. Even if I gave up 
all of modern science, the theory would still involve an incredibly 
implausible (to me) idea about how the documents were transmitted and 
edited. In particular, the assertions about how certain sections 
represent the point of view of Shem, Terah, et.al. strike me as absurd.

So I am wondering what the criteria are here. Is Karl's theory germane 
to the list because it is somehow tied to the word TWLDWT ? It seems to 
me to run much further afield (of BH) than Jim's analysis of 
place-names, and its supposed connection to Mesopotamian literary forms 
is at least as weak as Jim's  use of Egyptian documents.

By the way, I'm not trying to limit the list to its "true purposes". 
Everybody has their own purposes, and I assume that interest in BH is 
almost always motivated by one's attitude toward the Bible as a unique 
and special book. Thus I don't think that you can separate questions 
about BH from questions about the history of the text. (Karl often 
asserts that you can, and that the list must adhere to language 
questions, but here we see him breaking his own rule.)
My gripe is just that I see you guys upholding various standards of 
scholarship, and then in some cases throwing them out the window. Which, 
IMHO, is what you have to do in order to seriously discuss theories 
ascribing authorship to legendary characters like Adam and Noah. Or am I 
missing something?


Gabe Eisenstein