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  • From: James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>
  • To: Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] theories and standards
  • Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 19:39:22 +0100

Many statements you make betray a high level of naivity. You would like to paint yourself as a scientist and everybody else who doesn't agree with you as enemies of science and yet most of what you say betrays a lack of understanding of the fundamentals of the sciences in question.

e.g. Your debate about history.

The *definition* of history and prehistory is based on the foundation of what happened in the two distinct periods of a) what we have documentary evidence for and b) everything before that. The job of the historian is to sift through the masses of manuscripts and decide on, what he feels, to be the most trustworthy cycle of events. Archaeology is one of the things we look to for corroborative evidence.

You talk about the 'stone age' and 'the bronze age' as if they were well defined separate periods. That used to be the understanding but modern findings have shown that there can be and demonstrably is a massive overlap in these two periods.

You really need to do some research on some basic scientific fundamentals if you insist on persisting in maintaining this sharade that you are the objective scientist.

I haven't gone into the subject in any depth with you but you have also betrayed a lack of understanding of dating techniques, their problems and limitations and to be quite honest, in my mind, you are very far from being a scientist of any description.

James Christian




Quoting 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
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