Rival Methodologies for Dating Biblical Texts

These two volumes ostensibly addressing the same issue, how to determine the date of composition of biblical texts, appear to be operating in alternate universes. Ronald Hendel and Jan Joosten argue for the primacy and accuracy of diachronic linguistics of Hebrew as a methodological tool, whereas the contributors to the volume edited by Richard J. Bautch and Mark Lackowski are either dismissive of that strategy or do not avail themselves of it and utilize other methodologies. Strikingly, a number of them reach similar conclusions to Hendel and Joosten about the date of composition of biblical texts. I must be clear at the outset that I have previously argued that the linguistic method is the most effective one for the determining the date of the legal texts of the Bible and that utilizing the putative development of socio-economic institutions to do so is fraught with peril.¹

The book by Hendel and Joosten presents the state of the art in the diachronic linguistics of Biblical Hebrew without overwhelming the reader. It is a judiciously designed volume that benefits from close study, and in this review essay, I hope that I am offering constructive criticism that will help readers read it more effectively, not mere quibbling. This volume could have been easily three or four times as long, but its succinct yet informative format makes it an effective introduction for advanced Hebrew students, whether undergraduate or graduate, as well as being comprehensible by educated adults with a moderate level of Hebrew. For scholars, it is a volume that will help them catch up on advances in research and bibliography that they might have missed, especially with an annotated bibliography in an appendix. Yet the brief format means that the bibliography could have been much more complete and that the examples could have been more extensive. The reviewer wishes that there could be two versions of Hendel and Joosten's book, the current one and a massive one with room for a more extended set of examples and an exhaustive bibliography.²

Scholars seem to be polarized in their approaches to determining the date of biblical texts, and according to Hendel and Joosten, the reasons are twofold. Institutional limitations mean that scholars cannot be educated in every aspect of biblical studies and Hebrew. More serious is the second reason: scholars are willing to accept data and analyses of Hebrew only if they can be proven objectively true yet are willing to accept tentativeness in the history of ideas and links between texts. The first reflects the limit of all professional education: many matters need to be learned "on the job," after graduation, as the scope of one's work develops. This is true for Ph.D. education as well. The second is a more serious problem, to which Hendel and Joosten return in their final chapter.

The terminology used in diachronic linguistics is problematic. Designating a stratum of Hebrew "Classical Biblical Hebrew" versus "Late Biblical Hebrew" makes the assumption that one is the baseline and the other the deviation.³ This is also true for the methodology of determining the date. The reverse methodology could have been established, Late Biblical Hebrew could have been called Classical Biblical Hebrew and the early stratum "Early Biblical Hebrew." The use of terminology of "Classical Biblical Hebrew" and "Late Biblical Hebrew" privileges the First Temple period the same way the other school of demarcating the date privileges the Second Temple period. My preference would be to term the two linguistic strata as "Early Biblical Hebrew" and "Late Biblical Hebrew." But the terminology reflects a deeper structural problem with diachronic linguistics: only when there is...