BBS Philological
Dating
Introduction
What is for the most part an exact
copy of the script follows. There are a
few places where individual speakers could neither be heard nor understood: for
this we apologize. Every effort was made
to be precise: there were just spots that defeated us. Since this is a quote in its entirety it
seemed unnecessary to mark it with quotation marks. The notation for each speaker is tedious
enough: Narrator, Reader, etc. If you
discover bothersome errors please reply to this Blog and point them out. You may verify the script more easily by
starting to replay it where the “time” stamps indicate discussion begins. The second of the above links is free from
advertising and thus easier to use.
http://swantec-oti.blogspot.com/
We firmly believe that dating
differences between oral tradition and written record cannot be established on
the basis of grammar, spelling, syntax, and word nuances. Especially, with oral tradition, we have no
way of knowing what such grammar, spelling, syntax, or word nuances might have
been. For those who make such claims, we
wish to see one specific example, with supporting evidence that reveals an
unquestionable dating difference in the sequence necessary. We believe that provenance has the superior
claim on reality. We close with a quote
from Emanuel Tov. Tov does not say that
Torah reflects four interwoven and overlapping patterns.
“Each Scripture book reflects a different
textual pattern.”[1]
Script
Philological
Dating (time 19:20)
McCarter: The Hebrew Bible is a collection of
literature written over about a thousand years.[2] And as with any other language, Hebrew
naturally changed quite a bit over those thousand years. The same would be true from English; I’m speaking
English of the twenty-first century; and if I were living in Elizabethan times,
the words I chose, the syntax I used would be quite different.[3]
N: Scholars examine the Bible in its original
Hebrew, in search of the most archaic language, and therefore the oldest
passages. They find it in Exodus, the
second book of the Bible.
R: “Pharaoh’s chariots and his army, He cast into the
sea. His picked officers are drowned in
the Red Sea.” — Exodus 15:4
N: This passage, known as the Song of the
Sea,[4] is the climactic scene of
Exodus, the story of the Israelites in slavery in Egypt, and how Moses leads
them to freedom. In all of the Bible, no
single event is mentioned more times than the Exodus. With the development of ancient Hebrew script
the Song of the Sea could have been written by 1000 BC, the time of Tappy’s
alphabet. But, it was probably recited
as a poem, long before the beginning of Hebrew writing.
Lawrence E. Stager:[5] It is very likely that it
was the kind of story told in poetic form that you might tell around the
campfire, just as our songs are easier to remember generally than prose
accounts; so we generally think that the poetry is orally passed on from one to
another long before they commit things to writing.[6]
Commentary
We got a hint from the closing
statement of the previous section on the Tel Zayit Stone that a discussion of
philological dating was headed our way.
“To discover the most ancient text in the Bible, scholars examine the
Hebrew spelling, grammar, and vocabulary.”
We discussed this topic in our
previously published blog on Dating.
http://swantec-oti.blogspot.com/2015/05/dating.html
Here is a more comprehensive
approach
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_methodologies_in_archaeology
Of the four methods which we
discussed (provenance, 14C, pottery, and philology), we insisted
that philology, employed outside of the boundaries of its capability, is always
the least accurate of dating methods.
Provenance is the historical record
of the object from A to Z. It is the
chain of custody that preserves crime scenes.
It is exactly as good or bad as the character of the person or persons
who maintained it, and the care with which they preserved it. The provenance of a liar is of little or no
merit at all. The provenance of a
careless person is worth even less. The
provenance of an honest, careful observer may provide dates that are good
within a year, a month, a day, an hour, a minute, a split second. Careful observers will apply all the care
that is necessary for expressing the significant figures for the topic at hand. This is how we know the exact day of birth
for some important ancient persons, while others are lost and must be estimated
from other circumstances and dated. If
the date is not explicitly stated in the provenance, then it is necessarily an
estimate. The accuracy of that estimate
is no better than the technology upon which it is based.
Philological dating, as we use the
term here, involves far more than mere word analysis.[7] Otherwise, anybody could grasp after philological
solutions based on standardized and uniform printed texts. In this case anybody could be a philologist
and we wouldn’t need experts. A
philologist does not base the work on printed texts, for the most part. A philologist works from original artifacts,
manuscripts, and monuments. Any caveman
can discern the difference in printed editions between Judges, Joel, and Jonah.
Not everybody can look at two
ancient manuscript copies of the same document and determine that one is older
than the other: based on minor variations in grammar, spelling, and syntax; or
based on which words are arcane or not.
First of all, for the most part,
decisions about which grammars, spellings, syntaxes, and words are arcane are
very subjective when evaluating languages that are no longer in use.
We would find it impossible to date
a modern prayer or song, poem or even some prose as arcane simply because it
contained known arcane words: such as thy, thee, ye, thou, and the like. There is no rule that prohibits the use of
such words. Similarly, there is no rule
which prohibits a modern writer from using a Spenserian style of
penmanship. Indeed, this is how
calligraphers make their livelihood. If
we cannot expect to distinguish two modern documents by such methods, where we
know what arcane and Spenserian mean; how can we expect to apply them in a
field where we must discover the rules as we go along.
In ancient documents we must find
enough uses of a thing to determine its grammar, spelling, syntax, and word
meanings from use.[8] We are unlikely to be lucky enough to stumble
upon ancient grammars segregated by decades, centuries, or millennia. No ancient word lists or spellers are likely
to come our way; no discussions of syntax, no lexicons either. Lexicons and grammars are relatively modern
inventions and ancient ones are a rare archaeological find. In our case we thought ourselves extremely
lucky to find a schoolboy’s alphabet slate from 1000, the Tel Zayit stone. We were not lucky enough to find his spelling
book, or his first reader. When one
comes across a word, or grammatical structure, or word sequence, such as S-V-O,
subject-verb-object, that occurs hundreds or thousands of times, anybody can
eventually figure out what it means: so definitions, rules of grammar, and common
syntax can be formed. But when one comes
across a word that is used once or twice, or a strange syntax[9], or a totally foreign
grammatical structure: for example a third person, past tense, passive voice,
imperative mood, verb; then the task becomes considerably more daunting.[10]
The facts of the matter are that we
are not deluged with tons of Noahic, Japhetic, Hamitic, Semitic post Flood
literature: we have none that we know of.[11] We do not really know what happened at Babel;
we know what it says, but in terms of real experience we have nothing. We have highly developed Mesopotamian
cuneiform, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, with the emergence of alphabetic writing. For Canaanite, Phoenician, and paleo Hebrew
we have a few modern grammars and lexicons written by truly prodigious people. To assert that we know enough about any of
these to discern their dating based on observable arcane expression alone is a
fool’s errand. In most cases we don’t
have enough material to establish basic meaning and grammar. If meaning has to be determined from cognate
languages, then where is the sensitivity to nuance, which determines age? If a first translation can only be made after
finding a parallel language monument, then where is the detail that can fix a
date?
We are not being asked to believe
that Judges, Joel, and Jonah are sourced from different dates based in internal
markers and topical subject matter. We
are being asked to believe that two chapters from the same document and the
same scroll, with the same subject matter, are in fact time different; in spite
of the fact that their provenance claims them to be time identical. Moreover, we are being asked to believe such
a thing without tangible proof, with a paucity of supporting evidence from the
period.
Now, if the claim were being made
that the whole book of Genesis was based on oral tradition, we would be
completely sympathetic with that view.
There is no evidence that Moses received all or part of Genesis in
written form. It appears to be information
that he is the first to ever record.
That being said, the claim that the Song of the Sea is an ancient oral
tradition, predating Moses by thousands, hundreds, or even only ten of years is
ludicrous.
The point being made by The
Bible’s Buried Secrets is that Moses, according to them, did not write
Torah. They are building a foundation so
that they can claim that a few Canaanites, not even many, left Egypt, perhaps
as early as 1446, stumbled on the name JHVH, wrote a song about it, the Song of
the Sea, made the Canaanite Hit-Parade as early as 1200, and some scribe(s)
concocted a whole legendary false-history around the song, in order to explain
it, in 950, with later editions in 850, 600, and 500. On top of that we are able to figure all of
this out on the basis of grammar, spelling, syntax, and word nuances that differ
between the oral tradition and the written script; neither of which had ever
been in writing before.[12] Fantastic!
Unbelievable!
Conclusion
We firmly believe that dating
differences between oral tradition and written record cannot be established on
the basis of grammar, spelling, syntax, and word nuances. Especially, with oral tradition, we have no
way of knowing what such grammar, spelling, syntax, or word nuances might have
been. For those who make such claims, we
wish to see one specific example, with supporting evidence that reveals an
unquestionable dating difference in the sequence necessary. We believe that provenance has the superior
claim on reality. We close with a quote
from Emanuel Tov. Tov does not say that
Torah reflects four interwoven and overlapping patterns.
“Each Scripture book reflects a different
textual pattern.”[13]
[2]
This would be true with a 1446-1406 writing for Torah, but it cannot be made
true with a 950, 850, 600, and 500 dates for J, E, D, and P respectively. This would place the completion of the entire
Old Testament at 50 AD; yet the Dead Sea Scroll evidence and the Septuagint
both point to a 200 completion date. So
either McCarter has made a tremendous error in judgment, or his belief in an
early date for Torah is being twisted to support a theory in which he really
does not believe. To support The
Bible’s Buried Secrets, McCarter should have used a figure between 600
and 800 years.
[3] McCarter’s
statement is linguistically true as stated.
Languages do obviously change with time.
In the case of the “Song of the Sea” this fact is simply irrelevant and
inapplicable. It cannot be made useful
for comparing two documents written at the same time.
The argument could be made that the whole approach of The
Bible’s Buried Secrets is the excessive application of
Structuralism. The Bible’s Buried
Secrets begins with a preconceived structure in which: a. Only archaeology expresses real
history. b. The date of authorship cannot
precede extant artifacts by more than a few years. c. The motivations for writing must consist
of hidden agendas: thus the words have no real meaning, their only meaning is
in present time. d. The form of books
can be determined from careful analysis of key words or concepts: in this case
J, E, D, and P. e. The origin of the
books involved is not found in their chronological or their provenance, but in
their key-word structure. f. The form is
so important that the books must be rearranged to satisfy the form.
While other fields have abandoned Structuralism because of its
many flaws; higher-critics in general, and The Bible’s Buried Secrets
in particular cling to it.
As a scientific method Structuralism is untenable: it is
simply wrong from a number of angles. We
must be careful here to distinguish textual criticism, which is the legitimate
attempt to analyze extant manuscripts to determine the original words used, its
real historical form; rather than the illegitimate attempt to find its hidden
form, which is the goal of higher criticism.
“When text has a
significant political or religious influence (such as the reconstruction of
Biblical texts), scholars have difficulty reaching objective conclusions.”
Structuralism is the very thing that is being lampooned in Dead
Poets Society.
[4]
The “Song of the Sea” is the claimed to be oldest literary text according to
spelling, grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and the like. How do we analyze an orally transmitted poem,
which no longer exists as an orally transmitted poem, for spelling, grammar,
vocabulary, syntax, and the like? Where
do we find the parallel orally transmitted examples that are necessary to
discover word meanings, grammatical structure, and the like? Having found such a body of oral “literature”
how do we go about discovering which words and structures are arcane and which
are not arcane? We know how to do this
with written documents from different eras.
How do we do this with oral memories from the same era? This is what is impossible to accomplish. Specifically, which words have changed in
time, and how? Which spellings? Which grammar? Which vocabulary? Which syntax?
[5]
Lawrence E. Stager (1943 …), professor of archaeology at Harvard: Works: Gezer,
Tell el-Hesi, Ashkelon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Stager
[6] Stager’s
theorem is difficult to apply to any literary concept of Psalms. We would have to imagine troubadours sitting
around the campfire for decades, while David or other hymnodists only recorded
them later. This is especially difficult
to apply with the genre called Todah.
Todah are specifically written prayers, recording and giving thanks for
an historic blessing from Yahweh, and officially laid up in the most holy place
as part, the most important part of a thank offering. The entire book of Jonah is a Todah: are we
to imagine that it never really happened, simply because it is strange?
This is supposedly a separate poem preserved by oral
tradition. Why would we not draw the
same conclusion about Genesis 1, or any other number of poetic verses of
Scripture? As a matter of fact, poetry
as a class, tends to preserve matters of grammar and syntax far beyond their
common use. People still use iambic
pentameter in poetry and music. How can
we avoid the possibility that the poetic form is ancient, while its content may
very well be contemporary to the surrounding text? This is a nonsense conclusion. Poetry and hymnody cannot be dated by their
peculiarities of grammar and syntax, especially when the pertinent documents
are no longer or never were extant for scrutiny.
[7] We
have used the term, philology, to embrace a whole set of parallel skills. Technically a philologist is a “word lover”,
specializing only in words. In the
broader sense this field involves a whole army of decipherers, epigraphers, grammarians,
historians, lexicographers, linguistics experts (some, highly scientific), literary
critics, philologists, phoneticians, experts in the technical analysis of
writing media and surfaces, plus a host of others, all focused on the ancient
artifacts at hand. Since these skills
are often brought together in a single person, we are not surprised to find a
number of polymaths working in the field.
[9] Syntax
is a strange beast. We live in an age
where computers demand perfect syntax: because a computer is not smart enough
to reason beyond a syntactical error. One
misplaced dot in a link sequence like ht[.]tp(s)://www.pdq.xyz turns the whole communication
into meaningless gibberish.
In ancient artifacts we are frequently dealing with object
that have no apparent syntax. This
should not surprise us. Spoken language
is the original and works without rules for spelling: sounds are the only
important thing. Grammar and syntax are
expressed by intonation, pause, facial expression, and even body language. In the development of alphabetic writing the
discovery and expression of these things was a process, and art. Early alphabets were frequently written
without vowels: most likely because the importance of vowels went unrecognized
until somebody tried to pronounce a text with only consonants. Artifacts are frequently written in all
majuscule letters, with no word separation, no punctuation, and no accentuation. Where is the syntax in that? The expert has to figure it out as he goes
along: syntax without syntax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription
[10] In
the English mindset it is simply impossible to construct an imperative that is
not second person, present, indicative.
Here are some modern attempts to formulate ancient grammars for
Phoenician and Canaanite.
Note that Krahmalkov does not attempt to penetrate the maze (or
fog) beyond 1200. Note also that he
classifies Phoenician as Punic. Also, we
remind our readers that the Amarna Letters are written in Akkadian cuneiform, not in Canaanite. We were unable to find a grammar for
paleo-Hebrew. How would we construct a
grammar of oral tradition, and what would it mean.
[11] Perhaps
the term Proto-Indo-European
languages would have been more descriptive and more accurate scientifically.
[12]
Truly, the comic book versions were plagiarized from the movies.
[14] If you have been blessed or helped by any of these meditations,
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