Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

I would just relax and go ahead and blurt it all out. It could help you iron
out the problems in your theory. Anyway, I was always under the impression
you was amatorial and worked secularly. When did you start getting into
publishing?

James Christian

On 21 May 2010 02:22, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 unpublished ideas.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
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