Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Steinberg <david.l.steinberg AT rogers.com>]

The early dating of the so called "archaic poetry" is essentially based 
on the work of Albright, Cross and Freedman. It always went well beyond 
the evidence but has now been shown to be unfounded. A few elderly 
scholar whose reputations are bound up in early datings - Cross and Avi 
Hurvitz - still maintain the early dates but the evidence is against 
them. See -

1. The material I discuss and reference in the box /Can Biblical Texts 
be Linguistically Dated?/ http://www.houseofdavid.ca/anc_heb_6.htm 
<http://www.houseofdavid.ca/anc_heb_6.htm>

2. Vern, Robyn, "The Relevance of Linguistic Evidence to the Early 
Dating of the Archaic Poetry of the Hebrew Bible", PhD dissertation, 
University of Sydney, 2008.

 If you look at the text of any of the so called archaic poems,and you 
revert it to its probable form c. 1200-1400 BCE (add case, mood, and 
other short vowel endings, revert contractions of final /y/ and /w/ 
consequent on the disapearance of final short vowels etc.) you will find 
that the orthography is not really archaic and, in many cases, such as 
the use of /matres/ - is often typologically late.


David Steinberg