(DOWNLOAD) "What a Difference a Year Makes: Can Biblical Texts be Dated Linguistically?(Essay)" by Hebrew Studies Journal # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: What a Difference a Year Makes: Can Biblical Texts be Dated Linguistically?(Essay)
- Author : Hebrew Studies Journal
- Release Date : January 01, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 190 KB
Description
Language played almost no role in dating biblical texts in historical-critical scholarship prior to the middle of the twentieth century. Texts such as Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, Amos, Isaiah of Jerusalem, Second Isaiah, and the like were dated according to explicit references in their contents. Texts lacking such references were dated according to their supposedly implicit references to externally datable events. Others were dated by their theology or attitude towards the cult as determined by a chronological scale linked to some form of the documentary hypothesis as expounded by Julius Wellhausen or Abraham Kuenen, both of whom accepted a late, post-exilic date for the Priestly source as propounded by Karl Heinrich Graf. This scale was based on Enlightenment notions about the evolution of religion in general and Israelite religion in particular as a stage between primitive religion and Christianity. When first propounded, these evolutionary ideas were well-founded and tightly linked to historical theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But that clear theory with its chronological implications was confounded after the implications of discoveries in the ancient Near East were acknowledged by biblicists. The old critical consensus about the chronological dating of developmental stages in Israelite religion and of biblical books became vulnerable and challengeable. Some objective method was required to date the literature. The study of language history evolved in Europe during the nineteenth century and was able to mark impressive advances by the beginning of the twentieth century. The study of Hebrew lagged behind because there was no concentrated body of scholars interested in it. A "tipping point" was reached in 1925 with the establishment of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Since then, the discipline has attracted a few hundred researchers, developed a large body of competent, reliable literature, and has revealed unsurprisingly that Hebrew is a language with a history, just like other languages. One significant discovery of significance to our panel today was that Hebrew remained a spoken language and mother tongue until the second century C.E.