Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Rolf" <rolf.furuli AT sf-nett.no>]

Dear Ken,


I look forward to your posts and to a cordial discussion of the Hebrew verbal 
system and Semitic linguistics. I would like to read your dissertation. How 
can I get it?

A few years ago, a Norwegian professor made a study of which projects were 
accepted for doctoral studies at the University of Oslo. He discovered the 
with very few exceptions only projects whose working hypotheses were in 
accord with the view of the professors were accepted. Those that presented 
novel ideas were rejected.

I for one find it profitable, and scientifically necessary, to challenge the 
traditional viewpoints of our time. I see the same problems in different 
disciplines as I have seen in Hebrew: counterexamples to the traditional 
views are explained away ad hoc or ignored, and no one has tried to collect 
all the counterexamples and study them in their own right.

For many years I have studied the chronological data in the Tanakh. One 
problem is that the Neo-Babylonian and the Neo-Assyrian chronologies do not 
accord with the chronology presented in the Tanakh, and the Neo-Babylonian 
and Neo-Assyrian chronologies are believed to be watertight. I wanted to 
challenge and test this, and I collated important astronomical cuneiform 
tablets at the Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin and at  British Museum in 
London and looked at the dates of more than 30.000 cuneiform business 
documents— as expected,  I found that the map did not fit the terrain.

As for the Neo-Assyrian chronology, no astronomical tablets can be used for 
dating, and there are more than 40 eponyms too many to fit the traditional 
chronology. I found that this chronology hinges on one single datum, namely 
that the solar eclipse that is said to have happened in the eponymate of Bur 
Sagale is the eclipse of 15 June 763 BCE. However, this is gusswork, because 
there are at least eight other solar eclipses that can fit the mentioned 
eponymate. Regarding the Neo-Babylonian chronology, I found that the lunar 
positions of the astronomical diary VAT 4956, the backbone of the chronology, 
fit better the year 588/87 than the year 568/67 (the year fitting the 
traditional chronology). Moreover, I found about 90 business tablets that 
contradict the traditional Neo-Babylonian chronology. My conclusion is that 
the evidence suggest that the traditional chronology is wrong  and that both 
the Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian reigns of kings must be expanded by 
twenty years. I have also found that many adjustments are necessary for the 
Persian (Achamenid) chronology. The data have been published in two books of 
between 400 and 500 pages each. The reason why I have reached these novel 
chronological viewpoints,  is that I have collected and studied contradictory 
data that no other scholar has collected and studied. Also, that I have 
carefully studied each cuneiform sign on the most important astronomical 
tablets, and I have found some errors in the published readings and a lot of 
c conjectures that the readers are not aware of. Thus, a great part of the 
astronomical evidence can be questioned.

I mention this, because I see the unhealthy situation at many universities, 
where progress sometimes, or rather often, is curtailed, because of the 
traditional thinking and because of the excersize of authority, or as the 
Germans call it Systemzwang. My message is that there is so much traditional 
viewpoints out there that do not stand a close scrutiny. Therefore, we should 
not be afraid of new ideas, even if they are far away from the traditional 
ones. But we should carefully study these new ideas in order to see if they 
stand a close scrutiny.



Best regards


Rolf Furuli
Stavern
Norway




Torsdag 30. Mai 2013 11:43 CEST skrev Ken Penner <kpenner AT stfx.ca>:

> Rolf, you were kind enough to send me a copy of your dissertation in 2005, 
> and I read over several times in 2005-2006. Thank you. Have you read mine?
> I recognize that my previous post was not constructive; I mainly pointed 
> out problems without suggesting possible resolutions. I hope to remedy that 
> by a series of posts as I have time over the next month.
>
> Cheers,
> Ken
>
> Ken M. Penner, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor, Religious Studies
> 2329 Notre Dame Avenue, 409 Nicholson Tower
> St. Francis Xavier University
> Antigonish, NS  B2G 2W5
> Canada
> (902)867-2265
> kpenner AT stfx.ca
>