Biblical Hebrew Forum

[jimstinehart AT aol.com]

Karl W. Randolph wrote:  “By this time Torah scrolls were written using iron age font, examples of which were used as late as a couple of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Hilkiah recognized the importance of this scroll because he could read it, therefore he didn’t throw it out with the trash, but gave it to the scribe to bring to the king.  You need to bring evidence to back up your theories, but so far you have but conjecture upon conjecture.”

And earlier, Prof. Yigal Levin had written:  “In general, I find the idea of a book, Deuteronomy or otherwise, being ‘lost’ in the Temple since the days of Moses highly unlikely.  Since the Temple itself was only built centuries after Moses, where would it have been in the meanwhile?”

One traditional theory regarding those two questions is that what priest Hilkiah had found was one of two  o-r-i-g-i-n-a-l-s  of the Book of Deuteronomy.  It was not a mere copy!  Rather, the Biblical authors of II Kings and Chronicles are claiming (whether historically accurately or not) that one of two  o-r-i-g-i-n-a-l-s  of the Book of Deuteronomy was found in the Temple in Jerusalem.  So forget the Iron Age!  We’re going way back to the Bronze Age, which would necessarily entail a Bronze Age-style writing method, such as cuneiform.

The 1951 scholarly article that I previously cited explains the Biblical theory here this way:

“[W]hat exactly is implied by Hilkiah’s words ‘I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD’?  Do they imply that the book had been ‘lost’, and if so, what would constitute a ‘loss’ of a law-book in the Temple?  There may be no certain answer to these questions, but we may at least observe that it is difficult to account for Hilkiah’s behaviour throughout the incident unless he regarded his finding of the book as a discovery of something which, so far as his experience was concerned, had not been known in the Temple for some time.  Yet there is no reason to suppose that his attitude to the authority and antiquity of the book was any different from that of Josiah and Huldah.  Now if the book was Deuteronomy, as seems probable for the reasons already advanced, some interesting light is thrown on the situation;  for Deuteronomy makes three stipulations about its own use and preservation:  (a) the prototype was to be placed in the custody of the priests the Levites by the side of the ark of the covenant.  It was there a witness against the people, and was to be read to the assembly of all Israel at the end of every seven years (Deuteronomy xxxi. 9 ff., 24 ff.).  (b) A copy was to be made from this prototype for the use of the king when he should arise.  ‘It shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life:  that he may learn to fear the LORD his God’ (Deut. xvii.18 ff.).  (c) An engraving of the law was to be made ‘very plainly’ on the plaster surface of great stones to be set up for the purpose on Mount Ebal when the Jordan had been crossed (Deut. xxvii.1-8).  On any view of the antiquity of Deuteronomy, then, there is no reason to suppose that more than two copies of Deuteronomy ought to have been in existence in Jerusalem in the time of Josiah [p.32]—the prototype by the ark (or its descendant) and a royal copy.  It is easy now to see what a loss of this law would imply.  The king’s copy had clearly perished or was long lost, not surprisingly, and the priests’ prototype was no longer by the ark but either perished altogether or was concealed somewhere else in the Temple, deliberately or accidentally….”

Donald W.B. Robinson:  “Josiah’s Reform and the Book of the Law”.  http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/josiah_robinson.pdf

The claim being made at II Kings is that a Bronze Age  o-r-i-g-i-n-a-l  of Deuteronomy (or possibly some other ancient portion of the Torah) was discovered in the Jerusalem Temple in the 7^th century BCE.  In order to make a plausible case for that claim, a Bronze Age-style writing method, not Iron Age alphabetical Hebrew, would need to be supposed:  cuneiform.

Per Nir Cohen’s comment, that original would not have been written in Akkadian cuneiform.  Rather, it would have been written in cuneiform using west Semitic words, just as dozens of west Semitic words are written in cuneiform in the Amarna Letters.

Whether the story is historically accurate or not is questionable.  But the story makes sense, as I see it, if and only if what was discovered was conceptualized as having been written in cuneiform using west Semitic words, so that only Shaphan the scribe could read it.

George Athas is of course right that II Kings does not explicitly say that what was found was written in cuneiform.  But II Kings does very strongly imply that neither Hilkiah nor King Josiah could read it.  Only the scribe, whose professional duties required him to read cuneiform letters from Assyria and Babylonia, could read that type of writing system.  However, Shaphan could transform it into alphabetical Hebrew very quickly and easily, because the words, though written in cuneiform, were, you see, west Semitic.

The reason why Hebrew common words in the oldest part of the Torah read for the most part like 7th century BCE classical Biblical Hebrew is not because the Torah is late fiction ginned up in the 7th century BCE.  Rather, it's because the 7th century BCE is when the ancient cuneiform versions (using west Semitic words) were transferred over into alphabetical Hebrew.  T-h-a-t  is what is super-exciting about King Josiah's discovery.

Jim Stinehart

Evanston, Illinois