From: David Steinberg <david.l.steinberg AT rogers.com>
To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] song of Deborah
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2011 10:50:33 -0500
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 -
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.