Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 12:21 AM, James Christian wrote:
> Dating a work by linguistic factors is a shaky business in Hebrew. Our
> corpus is so small. If we are to form a dating framework based on what we
> see in the corpus ignoring the possibility that different authors may have
> used slightly different dialects/styles then the best we could ever hope to
> achieve is that of making relative observations. e.g. book a is older than
> book b or statement i in book a is later than statement j in book b.
> It's good that you bring inscriptions into the debate because then we have
> datable data that we can attempt to build a chronology around. However, I
> still have reservations about the size of the data set we have available and
> how sure we can be of any models we construct. I'm sure you would agree that
> it is good academic practise to acknowledge the limitations and possible
> errors when building such models.

James, yes, dating a work by linguistic factors is shaky business.  If you 
read
between the lines, you will see that I offer a suggestion for linguistic 
dating
of Ruth, but it is at best an educated guess.  I need to make assumptions
regarding what I called the "second stage."  For the orthography, though,
although the data set is small, I think we have sufficient data to make
conclusions.  I also think this is well recognized among all scholars.

> Also, I'm not sure if I understand why you are wary of elaborating your
> theories on list. Are you afraid someone will steal your thunder and publish
> your work?

No, I just don't think the list is the place to heavily and continuously 
expound
unpublished ideas.  It is good for testing out an idea the first few
times, but it
shouldn't be a place where ideas that have not received critical examination
or worse -- have received critical examination and have been rejected --
are consistently used as evidence in arguments.

Yitzhak Sapir