Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>]

Karl wrote:
>There are different responses to the theory, two of which I consider
plausible: the story in Genesis is a pious fraud foisted on a credulous
people starting shortly before the Babylonian Exile, continuing into the
post Exile age (Documentary Hypothesis); or it is a true history (which is
the point of view I take). A third option, that the words don?t mean what
they mean I consider incoherent.
[end Karl]

A 4th option: the book is a mixture of mythology, legend and literature. 
(Later Biblical books mix in history as well.) Ancient people were by 
and large more sophisticated about these categories than those moderns 
who adhere to a strict truth/fiction dichotomy. They weren't victims of 
fraud (although it is true that after hundreds of years some people 
begin to treat legends as strictly factual.) (And some people treat tv 
soap operas as factual.) You can take pride in legends about national 
heroes and founders without "believing" them in the strict modern sense. 
And you can appreciate literary expansions of oral legends without 
imagining them to be factual accounts. (The Aeneid, for example.) What's 
important in such cases is that the literary work says something true 
about the national character, the sociopolitical circumstances, etc.
As for "shortly before the Exile", even if I think that parts of 
Deuteronomy and Kings were written shortly before the Exile, I assume 
that precursor documents and oral legends go back for many centuries.

Karl wrote:
> Much of what is claimed to be history really isn?t. Strictly speaking,
history are the events recorded in writing. The Bible claims to have
preserved the most ancient of records. As for pre-history, when did that
occur? Did it occur? Is there such a thing as pre-history? There is no way
we can tell for certain.
[end Karl]

No, strictly speaking, history is an account of past events using all 
available evidence. If I look outside and the ground is wet, I consider, 
among other possibilities, the hypothesis that it rained. I don't need a 
document saying that it rained. Your questioning of whether anything 
happened that isn't written down seems very bizarre to me. I think it 
must be part of your defense against looking seriously at the 
foundations of archaeology, geology, biology and the other sciences you 
reject (in their mainstream form).

Karl wrote:
I happen to trust that the Bible gives an accurate account of history, other
people say it is fiction. To each his own. We are here to discuss the
language, not whether or not what the message imparted by the language is
true or fiction.
[end Karl]

And yet you're the one who brought up the theory about toledoth formulas 
and Bronze Age writing. Which is fine with me. But I disagree that there 
is a "message imparted by the language" that can be interpreted 
independently of one's views about who/how/why/when the language was 
written and transmitted. I think I have some understanding of the 
message of Moby Dick, for example; but my understanding would change 
dramatically if I found out that it was a factual account. And in the 
case of historical writers (take Josephus, for example), I take into 
account the motivations and possible prejudices of the writer , in order 
to determine what is really being said.
We already went through the example of the curses  in Deuteronomy that 
seem to be copied from Esarhaddon's vassal treaty. Here it makes a big 
difference in how I understand the meaning of the text, whether I think 
that Moses was speaking extemporaneously using sentences he had read or 
heard, or that writers in the neo-Assyrian age used language of the 
Emperor to put God in the Emperor's place (and whether the audience, far 
from being victims of fraud, understood that the document addressed 
their current situation). We get more meaning out of the same language 
when we read Esarhaddon's version, both because the meaning is more 
clearly spelled out, and also because certain obscure words can be 
understood with reference to Akkadian cognates. And in general, we can 
improve the meaning of the Biblical text by assuming that it has been 
subject to changes, both willful and accidental, in the course of its 
transmission.

One thing I originally hoped to find on this list was more discussion of 
the evolution of Hebrew, as analyzed by Rendburg et.al. The theory that 
humanity and language began in the Bronze Age would not, it seems to me, 
be compatible with a scientific history of Hebrew. But of course the 
data are sparse. Nevertheless it seems to me that when you begin 
analyzing linguistic differences between books such as Genesis and 
Kings, you are playing a game that must ultimately destroy your 
position. Some scholars discern linguistic forms in Judges and 
Deuteronomy that they claim are older than the language of Genesis. 
Surely such facts must make a difference to our understanding of the 
meaning of the words in question.


Gabe Eisenstein