>The only book in Tanakh that systematically used a lot of materes
Thanks for the clarification. I realised that you were not rejecting
copyists' errors, and I accept that you now allow changes of
orthographic convention.
I am glad that you admit to "given my presuppositions" here. For your
idea is based on some clear presuppositions
... about the nature of the
Torah and how it was revered, which may be accurate for 2000 years later
in the Rabbinic and Masoretic period but which may well be totally
untrue of the period immediately after the Exodus.
.... As you say, "we have
to play with the hand we're dealt", and the hand we're dealt includes no
evidence for the 22 letter alphabet until several centuries after your
Exodus date.
.... There is a real possibility that Moses wrote down the TorahThis goes back to what I said before, "as a historian, we have to play
(assuming for now that he did write it down) in a script quite different
from this, possibly an Egyptian script or perhaps something more like
"proto-Sinaitic" with more than 22 letters; but then later, perhaps in
the monarchy period, the Israelites adopted the 22 letter script which
was by now the regional standard, and new copies of the Torah were
written in this script.
I note that these kinds of script changes have been common through
history, and especially over the last century in various countries,
largely for wider political reasons; and while religious establishments
have sometimes initially rejected the script changes they have soon come
to realise the necessity of republishing even the holiest of books in
the newly accepted script.
... In the history of the Hebrew Bible, this isJust as in the example above of German switching from Fraktur to
known to happened with the change from palaeo-Hebrew type script to
Aramaic square script. Why should it have not happened also at an
earlier time? So, while we have no direct evidence of such a change, we
have no reason to reject it as a possibility. Still less can we assume
that this did not happen and so that the existence of later copies of
the Torah in the 22 letter script is evidence with any significant value
that it was initially written in this script.
--With the historical record claiming that Hebrew writing was almost
Peter Kirk
E-mail: peter AT qaya.org
Blog: http://speakertruth.blogspot.com/
Website: http://www.qaya.org/
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