Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>]

Yohanan and Karl,

You both seem to misunderstand me. I am not saying that the mere mention of
a deity in a text, biblical or otherwise, makes it unreliable as a source of
historical information. Of course ancient writers of all kinds very often
invoked the deity in their writings. This was part of ancient culture. My
emphasis on "secular history" was an answer to Jim, using HIS terminology.
In my own words, I would say "extra-biblical". 
Jim is claiming, that since there is no reference to the places, peoples and
events of Gen. 14 in "secular history" (i.e. extra-biblical documents) of
southern Canaan, but similar (in HIS reconstruction) names do appear in 14th
century Egyptian (or whatever you would call the Amarna letters) documents
relating to northern Canaan, this is the background that we should assign
Gen 14. My answer was that there are other ways to deal with this lack of
evidence other than to invent historical connections where they don't exist.


Yigal Levin 

-----Original Message-----
From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of K Randolph
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 6:09 PM
To: B-Hebrew
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Year 14

Yohanan:

You make a good point, that just because an ancient writing was produced
from a "religious" point of view, does not negate it as an accurate
"secular" history when mentioning events that happened. In fact, it is a
rare ancient history that was not written from a "religious" point of view.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 6:00 AM, Yohanan bin-Dawidh <
yohanan.bin.dawidh AT gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Yigal;
>
> .



> Merely because YHWH is mentioned in a text, and merely because there is a
> spiritual / religious tone to a document, does not mean that the document
> cannot also be thought of as a secular document, especially in our
> culture's
> ancient society, which was entirely theocentric.
>
> Regards,
>
> Yo*h*anan bin-Dawidh
>
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