Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Jim:

On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 4:40 AM, <jimstinehart AT aol.com> wrote:

>
> 1.  You wrote:  “Now, I can see Abram dwelling near a large amount of oaks
> because Northern California from about 50 miles South of Redding, CA on I-5
> going North has
> plenty. Its weather is very much like Israel's with its Mediterranean
> climate. I
> can actually picture Abram sitting under a very large Oak (cf. 14:13,
> 24;18:1).”
>
> The city of Hebron does not have a Mediterranean climate.  It is nowhere
> near the Mediterranean Sea, but rather abuts the utterly bleak Judean
> Desert.
>

Please don’t parade your ignorance. The effects of the Mediterranean climate
are not limited to within a few miles of the coast, yet Hebron is within a
few miles of the coast.

Further, which I have mentioned before, there are varieties of oak trees
that do quite well in fairly dry conditions and are found even in deserts.
If it weren’t for deforestation, Hebron would still be surrounded by oak
trees. As it is, there are fields for growing crops all around Hebron.

>
> … On the scholarly view, …


Your “scholarly view” is only a subset of scholars, not all scholars agree
with your view. Other scholars look at the message imparted by the text as
being more important than theories that have no basis in history,
archaeology or linguistics.


> … multiple 1st millennium BCE authors are making up a pre-history of the
> Hebrews.  To them, the “days of old” would presumably have meant “dry
> years”, since the climate in the first half of the 1st millennium BCE was
> much wetter and better than in the Late Bronze Age.  So to me it seems
> unlikely that 1st millennium BCE authors would imagine rare oak trees being
> at the city of Hebron in the Patriarchal Age.
>

This is illogical. They would write for their own time, not for some
forgotten period centuries before their time.

>
> (a)  There were no Hittites from eastern Anatolia in Canaan.
>

You have already been corrected on this at least once before, the “Hittites”
of Canaan were the descendants of Het, one of the sons of Canaan, not
anybody from Anatolia. The similarity of names has tripped you up.

>
>
> Jim Stinehart
> Evanston, Illinois
>
> One of the reasons you fail to convince anyone, it that you don’t seem to
learn from your mistakes. You make a mistake, people correct you on it, then
you repeat the mistake. How do you expect to convince people of your
theories when you do things like that?

Karl W. Randolph.