Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Petr:

On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 9:21 AM, Petr Tomasek <tomasek AT etf.cuni.cz> wrote:

> On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 02:52:32AM -0700, K Randolph wrote:
> > Petr:
> >
> >…
> > What sort of question is this? The text of Tanakh is evidence. Whether
> you
>
> No! It's definitely not an "evidence". The Hebrew Bible is ideologicaly
> biased text and not a historical record. On the contrary, it can be
> proven, that "dating" itself "long in the past" served Hasmonean writers
> of Tanakh for their ideological purposes...
>

Irrelevant! That the Hasmonean rulers used the text for their own purposes
has no bearing on the composition date of the text.

>
> > trust it or not is a different matter. Further, the sentence I wrote
> above
> > does not specifically claim that Genesis is from the early bronze age,
> > rather that Genesis is the only historical record that gives any
> indication
> > of the language of early bronze age Canaan.
> >
> > The claims of Tanakh: Solomon started building the temple 490 years after
> > the Exodus, which was 430 years (LXX) or 645 years (MT) after the promise
> > given to Abraham. That puts Abraham in the early bronze age.
>
> Those are just claims. No proofs.
>

Did I claim they were proofs? But they are data points that you need to
explain away if you want to discount them, and you have no good explanations
to discount them.

>
> On the other hand, If (as some scholars pointed out recently) according to
> the
> Tanakh "chronology" the year 164 BCE occured "4000 years after the
> creation" and
> the exodus happened 2666 years after creation (which is 2/3 of 4000), it's
> clear that the Tanakh was COMPOSED in year 164 BCE by/for the Hasmonean
> rulers!
>

That is such a leap that I don’t see the logic of it, particularly in view
of my response above. Unless I’m mistaken, some of the DSS Biblical texts
date to a century earlier than the Hasmonean rulers.

> --
> Petr Tomasek <http://www.etf.cuni.cz/~tomasek>
> Jabber: butrus AT jabbim.cz
> SIP: butrus AT ekiga.net
>

To expand on what I said: Genesis does not indicate which language(s) the
people were speaking in the EBA Canaan, however certain inferences can be
made. One of those is from the apparent ease that Abraham had in
communicating with the Canaanites—did he adopt their language, or were the
languages that similar? Or did he use translators? The story of Joseph
implies that translators were not used by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when
dealing with Canaanites. Further the Mesha Stele from centuries later
showing that Moabite was still almost identical to Hebrew implies a
continuity. But beyond these inferences, we are on really shaky ground to
insist that Hebrew was the original language, because there are no texts
that make that claim, not even in the Bible.

Karl W. Randolph.