Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

George:

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 4:10 PM, George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>wrote:

> Karl, you're committing a classic faux pas: mistaking the world of the text
> for the real world and using them interchangeably.


I am making an assumption that the book accurately records ancient history,
and as such, reflects the real world just as well as an accurate, modern
history dealing with the times of Mao Tse Tung and his legacy as it affects
the modern world.


> You're not alone in this. Many, many people do it. But this does not make
> it excusable. Now in many (perhaps even most) cases, there is considerable
> overlap between the world of the text and the real world, particularly as it
> projects real persons and events into a literary form. But they are not
> exactly the same. It is a mistake to assume that the narrator/speaker of a
> text is necessarily the same as the author. You have to find a datum outside
> the text itself to confirm this.
>

If you see a modern book, e.g. *Challenge, a saga of the Northwest* with the
author listed as Olga Overn, are you claiming that we cannot trust the
author listing?

But more so, many ancient books have no data outside the text to verify
their authorship, so to be consistent, are you saying that we have to doubt
their authorship as listed with those books as well?

>
> To add to Don's comments, Qohelet very much evinces a style at home in the
> Persian and/or Hellenistic contexts. In particular, the reticence to use the
> divine name in favour of a more generic אלהים is consistent with the waning
> of henotheistic religions in the Persian Era and beyond. The philosophical
> questioning of a classic Deuteronomistic theology is also something that
> flourishes in the Persian Era and beyond, and this is very much a key
> ingredient in the rise of apocalypticism, as Don mentioned.
>

The ideas presented in the book are not unique to any one time or place,
rather are found even today. But the ideas do not date the book.

Looking at the literary style, the way the sentences are constructed and how
the ideas are presented, we find that Qohelet is an example of
pre-Babylonian Exile, kingdom era high literature. What you have to show is
that this literary style was used in the Hellenistic era, and as far as I
have been told, it was not, as found in the DSS and in the Biblical books
that have traditionally been recognized as post-Babylonian Exile.

>
> Finally, your comments about the loanwords are not actually building an
> argument.


Nor are yours. An argument from silence (yours) doesn’t prove the converse.


> A range of possibilities may exist to explain a situation, such as the
> presence of a loanword in Hebrew, but this does not mean that each
> possibility has equal weighting. To treat them as though they do is a gross
> mistake in argumentation. And to then make a conclusion based on a weak
> possibility is to make a very weak argument.


My only conclusion is that your argument is weak. Your argument stands if
and only if you can prove something that you cannot prove because of a lack
of data.


> Many of the 'possibilities' that you mentioned are essentially arguing from
> silence.


I see you arguing from silence, which is why I reject your statements.


> There is little to no evidence for the possibilities you mention.


That’s exactly my point. And there is no evidence against the possibilities
I mention as well. All we have is a loan word, but we don’t know how nor
whence nor when it came into Biblical Hebrew. To say in the absence of data
that it had to have come from a certain language at a certain time is a weak
argument, at best.


> It's much preferable to work with hard data and draw conclusions from them,
> than to make conclusions while lingering in logical limbo.
>
> Sorry, but sometimes acknowledging that one is in logical limbo due to lack
of data is better than jumping on a wrong train.

>
>
> GEORGE ATHAS
> Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia)
> www.moore.edu.au
>
> Karl W. Randolph.