At 02:54 AM 01/01/2000 +0100, you wrote:
>I would say happy new year, we are by now three hours within the official
>3rd millennium here.
>Remeber something called form-criticism? And what kind of text are we
>talking about-formcriticallty speaking. I am not inconsistent as I never
>said that the text need to be contemporary with the earliest manuscripts but
>ther earliest manuscripts are the starting point, if you want to dig
>bagwards, and there is in the case of the Hinnom inscriptions plenty of
>indications that their text was already accepted as a formulaic text. It is
>matter of genre and context.
Wouldn't you say that the Biblical texts of the 2nd BCE show the same type
of accceptance as the Hinnom inscription and hence we need to posit a
similar pre-history?