Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

George:

In response to your questions, I decided to look up a bit about the Medes
and Persians (seeing as the Persians were originally a small offshoot of the
Medes) and it appears from a quick read that not much is known about either
people or their languages before about the eighth century BC.

Concerning the term PRDS, how wide spread was it among Indo-European peoples
in the 10th century BC? I would dare say that this is a question for which
we don’t have an answer, nor can we have an answer. Wars and the
vicissitudes of time have destroyed the evidence we need to make such an
answer. So how did it come into the Hebrew language? Again, we don’t know.

All I can say for certain is that just this one term in isolation is
insufficient evidence to give any date for authorship of the document.

As I said before, I will state again: we know too little about the
linguistic milieu surrounding Biblical Hebrew that we usually cannot
determine which were loan words, and if loan words, were they to or from
Hebrew? Or were they common words known in many languages?

Karl W. Randolph.

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 12:26 PM, George Athas 
<George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>wrote:

> There is, of course, no logical reason why פרדס could not have been known
> to a 10th century BC Solomon. However, it would be highly unusual for a
> single word from Persian indicating a luxury estate to be so widely known
> that it made its way into Hebrew and was able to describe an equivalent
> phenomenon known in Judah at a time when Persia was a measly little kingdom
> up in the Zagros Mountains away from major highways and trade routes. It
> makes a lot more sense that this word was disseminated through a number of
> languages when Persia was actually able to influence them.
>
> The thing that worries me about discussion of loanwords is assertion
> without solid evidence. Yes, there are lots of possibilities, but in making
> an argument for something we really need to talk about probabilities. All
> too often I've found discussion of loanwords driven by a concern to preserve
> early dates for biblical books, usually in the attempt to associate them
> with a particular author. This unfortunately compromises an honest
> evaluation of the available evidence, leading some to propose what is a
> 'logically possible' situation (e.g. פרדס entered Hebrew before the 10th
> century BC) and attempt to pass it as either the most valid working
> hypothesis, or as the conclusion. The argument that says 'Nothing prevents X
> from being early' is not very strong. Far better is the argument that says,
> 'X is early because of A, B, and C.' The former is based largely on silence,
> while the latter is based on more specific evidence.
>
> I'm not committed in any way to early or late dating of texts (it's neither
> here nor there for me), but I am concerned that our arguments acknowledge
> their strengths and weaknesses.
>
>
> GEORGE ATHAS
> Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia)
> www.moore.edu.au
>
>