Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

George:

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 6:15 PM, George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>wrote:

> Ok, Karl. I'm yet to see any hard data from you to back up your assertions.
> At the moment the argument sounds like a chasing after the wind. I've given
> data and given my conclusion based on them. If you think the hard data I'm
> dealing with is silence, then we have nothing to talk about.
>

You have produced one data point. But is that the only data point that
existed? Was the word in use among the Medes centuries earlier? Was it in
use among other Indo-European languages that were in contact with ancient
Israel?

You are making the argument that your one data point is the only one that
ever existed, and my answer is: how do you know? This is where you are
arguing from silence.

>
> Just for the record:
>
>  *   Qohelet is not a modern history book. It's an ancient philosophical
> diatribe, mostly in the first person. BIG difference!
>

Its opening verse is a historical statement that puts the book into a
historical milieu. From other histories and looking at events portrayed in
the book, we find a contextual match.


>  *   Qohelet was not produced by a modern author who signed a contract with
> a publishing house so that authorship and copyright can be legally and
> factually verified.
>

Irrelevant, as through most of history, books were published without
contracts and copyrights.


>  *   To project modern publication practices onto the ancient world is
> either a very poor parallel from which to argue, or evidence of a naïve
> handling of literature.
>  *   Where are the 'high literature' examples that are comparable to
> Qohelet from the pre-exilic era?
>

Includes Isaiah, Jeremiah, Job, etc. I’m talking about literary style
(language use) here, not ideas propagated.


>  *   Amongst Jewish literature, the closest parallels to Qohelet are Ben
> Sira and Wisdom of Solomon (both Hellenistic).
>

While those parallels are parallels in ideas, they are not parallels in
language use. The language of Qohelet is Biblical Hebrew, that of Ben Sira
is Hebrew, … but strange.


>  *   In terms of genre, the closest comparisons exist in the Hellenistic
> philosophical diatribe. Teles of Megara is a very good example.
>

Again, ideas are timeless, they do not date a document unless there are
statements in the document that tie it to a particular place and time.

In Qohelet we have more than one statement that ties it to one person, one
place, one time period.


>  *   There is plenty of evidence against your 'possibilities'.


OK, for the loan word, did it exist in other languages besides Persian? You
can’t answer that because of lack of evidence. Your assertion that it didn’t
is an argument from silence.

You have no evidence that the language used in Qohelet is late, rather all
the evidence points to that the language is pre-Babylonian Exile.


> Your possibilities cannot be be 100% disproved,… You refuse to adequately
> take on board the weighting of possibilities, but rather treat them all
> flatly with equal weight.


I am saying that you do not take into account language use, and literary
style trumps a single loan word which may have had other ways of being known
in ancient Israel other than the one known to modern historians.


> This is poor logic and argumentation. Probability outweighs possibility.


Let’s say I am standing outside, and I see a rock hit the ground next to me.
Where did that rock come from? There are all sorts of possibilities, I need
to look around me, to establish context, to assess probabilities.

Now I look at a book that has a foreign loan word. When I assess the
language use, it is good pre-Babylonian Exile Hebrew, so what is the
probability that that loan word came into the language from a
post-Babylonian Exile context?

I look at a book that has historical references as to when it was written,
and it has a foreign loan word, then look at possible languages from which
the loan word could have come, and find that they have no to limited extant
writings in those languages, is it logical to rule out those languages as
sources for that loan word? Is not ruling out those possibilities an
argument from silence? Further, given the historical and archaeological
evidence of contact between these other languages and ancient Israel, does
that not increase the probability that the word could have come from one or
more of those languages?

The two factors above, language and historical references, lessen the
probability that the loan word had to have come from post-Babylonian Exile
Persia.


>   *   Given the quality of the argument you've put up, I suspect nothing I
> say will convince you.
>
> You haven’t given any arguments that I find convincing yet. They don’t
address factors that I think are important.

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