We completely agree with your “Surely not” to the question, “Should we abandon the discipline of historical linguistics of biblical Hebrew?” However, as we have argued in several places, “linguistic dating,” of which this book is indeed the state of the art, is not the same thing as “historical linguistics” (e.g., Currents, pp. 11-13). Attempting to date works of unknown origin by their language is not a normal procedure in mainstream historical linguistics. In our opinion, linguistic dating of biblical writings does not hold water. Historical linguistics does to the degree that the nature of the sources allows.
One key part of historical linguistics is understanding the nature of the sources before using their evidence. In agreement with the consensus of mainstream scholars, you yourself have written important work on the composite nature of the biblical compositions due to editorial and scribal processes. In line with this, and as mentioned in our article, we have discussed at length (both theoretically and practically in hundreds of pages of cross-textual variable analysis in Masoretic Text parallel texts and MT vs. other text traditions) the high fluidity of non-standard Hebrew linguistic features (e.g., HLBH, pp. 117-210, 413-591, and elsewhere). To our knowledge, nobody has engaged in depth with our data and arguments, so the claim that “the standard model is more probable and more consonant with the evidence” seems to us unfounded.
One question from us that we are curious about. Aaron Hornkohl argues that the language of the whole Pentateuch is no later than about 800BCE. How does that fit with the views in your recent excellent commentary on Genesis 1-11 that the composition (and language) of the sources in this section of the Pentateuch (and presumably elsewhere in the Pentateuch) dates to the 9th-5th centuries BCE, from the monarchic to the early postexilic periods?
Thanks for the comments, Ron.
We completely agree with your “Surely not” to the question, “Should we abandon the discipline of historical linguistics of biblical Hebrew?” However, as we have argued in several places, “linguistic dating,” of which this book is indeed the state of the art, is not the same thing as “historical linguistics” (e.g., Currents, pp. 11-13). Attempting to date works of unknown origin by their language is not a normal procedure in mainstream historical linguistics. In our opinion, linguistic dating of biblical writings does not hold water. Historical linguistics does to the degree that the nature of the sources allows.
One key part of historical linguistics is understanding the nature of the sources before using their evidence. In agreement with the consensus of mainstream scholars, you yourself have written important work on the composite nature of the biblical compositions due to editorial and scribal processes. In line with this, and as mentioned in our article, we have discussed at length (both theoretically and practically in hundreds of pages of cross-textual variable analysis in Masoretic Text parallel texts and MT vs. other text traditions) the high fluidity of non-standard Hebrew linguistic features (e.g., HLBH, pp. 117-210, 413-591, and elsewhere). To our knowledge, nobody has engaged in depth with our data and arguments, so the claim that “the standard model is more probable and more consonant with the evidence” seems to us unfounded.
One question from us that we are curious about. Aaron Hornkohl argues that the language of the whole Pentateuch is no later than about 800BCE. How does that fit with the views in your recent excellent commentary on Genesis 1-11 that the composition (and language) of the sources in this section of the Pentateuch (and presumably elsewhere in the Pentateuch) dates to the 9th-5th centuries BCE, from the monarchic to the early postexilic periods?