Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>]

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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