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July 19, 2008
Linguistic Dating Colloquium
An abnormally interesting online colloquium on linguistic dating of Biblical Hebrew is underway on the Biblical Studies Discussion list. If you haven't signed up for the list, you'll need to. The colloquium starts with the work of Ian Young, Robert Rezetko and Martin Ehrensvärd and their forthcoming Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts. Volume 1: An Introduction to Approaches and Problems. Volume 2: A Survey of Scholarship, a New Synthesis and a Comprehensive Bibliography. BibleWorld. London: Equinox Publishing, 2008. Rezetko has posted a very useful summary of part of their two volumes. You can access the whole summary via the Biblical-Studies Discussion list. The following caught my eye,
The 500 words of the Arad inscriptions exhibit an accumulation of nine LBH features—more than the accumulation that led Hurvitz to consign the Prose Tale of Job to the postexilic period! In fact, as you can see from the table, the preexilic Arad inscriptions from c. 600 BCE have a higher accumulation of LBH features than Ben Sira and Pesher Habakkuk, sources from the last two centuries BCE. Chronology is clearly not the explanation for these accumulations of LBH features, but rather that some authors have a stylistic preference for them. There is a strong case that many, if not most, LBH linguistic features already existed in preexilic Hebrew. If so, there is no reason why a preexilic author—like Qoheleth as Young has argued—could not produce a work with an accumulation of LBH features. Thus it is a reasonable suggestion that even in the preexilic period LBH could have been a co-existing style of Hebrew with EBH.
I am following the colloquium with abnormal interest. I also look forward to the appearance of the two-volume study. I may even have a few things to say on this subject at some point.
Posted by Duane Smith at July 19, 2008 2:59 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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Comments
I've known Robert for a long time and seen his work on dating Hebrew develop over the years. Now that it's going public in a major way, it looks like linguistic dating of biblical texts will become much, much more difficult if not entirely impossible. The work is important, but I'm sort of sorry to see what was once thought a rather empirical way to date materials go by the wayside.
Posted by: Alan Lenzi at July 19, 2008 4:51 PM
Yeah, I share your sense of loss and I'm not completely sure all is lost. But as far as I've seen, quite different approaches need to be developed and applied and I don't have the foggiest idea what those might be. On the other hand, I think the idea, dare I say theory, of parallel "conservative" and freer linguistic traditions within BH could be very fruitful in developing extremely interesting and unique research trajectories. I was glad to see that Young, Rezetko and Ehrensvärd looked at the epigraphic material. While it sure would be nice if there were a lot more of it, it does provide a kind of baseline for discussions of pre-exilic Hebrew. At least one can be sure it is pre-exilic.
On another, somewhat related front, one of the most vexing things in comparative Semitics is if one finds a nice Bronze Age parallel to something in BH it is just as likely that the BH will be from an obviously late BH source as from an early one.
Posted by: Duane at July 19, 2008 5:20 PM
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