Re: celebrating Passover

On 23 Aug 2005 15:57:53 -0700, Joe Bernstein wrote:

> Alter S. Reiss wrote:
>
>> On 18 Aug 2005 13:15:47 -0700, Joe Bernstein wrote:
>
>> (Iron Age 2 Archaeology & History. On Topic or Off Topic? You decide!)
>
> Well, if it's any comfort, I'm retreating this time to more meta
> issues, which means, in essence, that I'm talking more on-topic.
> You'll see.

And, indeed I have.

> Thanks for the references, though.

No problem.

> Oh, and I *am* snipping mercilessly.

I'm pretty sure I'll do the same.

>>> Alter S. Reiss wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Mon, 1 Aug 2005 23:25:51 +0000 (UTC), Damien Sullivan wrote:
>>>
>>>>> Joe Bernstein <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>

(Date of the composition of the OT)

>>
>> Well, I've certainly heard people giving an earlier date of that
>> composition -- 400 - 600 BCE being referred to minimalists. They might not
>> give themselves that title, of course.
>
> Well, nobody gives themselves the "minimalist" title except this guy
> Vince de Caen who means something completely different by it.
>
> These days, people like Lester Grabbe and John Van Seters who believe
> in an earlier and a later layer, with the earlier being written 600-400
> or so, don't get called "minimalist" by anyone I see; but I'm a couple
> of years out of date, so I guess "these days" is a bit disingenuous.
> Anyway.

I suppose there's a difference between being called something in print, and
being called something in casual conversation. Most of the really current
information I'm getting in the field is in casual conversation, as I've
been focusing my readings in the literature of the field on other subjects.

>> And I'm not certain that 'the entire Old Testament' is really where the
>> majority of scholarly dispute is taking place. At least in archaeological
>> circles, the time whose history is in serious dispute is most that covered
>> by Kings I&II, and Samuel I&II.
>
> Yes, but my main concern is when the Torah was written. (Not my only
> concern - I'm also interested in Ezekiel and at least two of the
> Isaiahs. But Genesis is way more important than Samuel to the history
> of fantasy, and very little else is even in the running.) And when the
> Torah was written is *tightly* bound up with the debates that are going
> on about the archaeology; I mean, if Judah is this hardscrabble
> nowheresville, it's presumed to produce no great literature. (Hesiod
> doesn't exist, see, so we *know* poor land can't produce writers.)

As you point out in the aside, while it's "bound up" with those debates,
there isn't necessarily a good reason why they're bound up with those
debates. As far as archaeological data for Genesis and Exodus goes, it's.
.. . unlikely that good data will show up that indicates that the texts were
composed in the Late Bronze. On the other hand, you do get the occasional
confirmation of a point that the Biblical text insisted on (the possibility
that there were, in fact, non-locals passing through the levant carrying
incense to Egypt, as described in the Joseph narrative seems likely, given
the patterns of Egyptian uses of those materials and potential sources, for
example).

The real problem with putting the writing of those texts very early is the
absence of much writing coming from those periods. Unlike Egypt or
Mesopotamia, or various other regions in the orbits of those powers, the
Israel and Judah of the Iron Age don't seem to have done much writing on
materials that have been preserved -- a few inscriptions, mostly by various
conquerers, and a handful of ostrakoi. Could be they were using something
more perishable for writing (and, as I recall, there are at least some seal
bullae which would support that idea), but Occam says they were less
literate than other cultures, and thus unlikely to have kept long written
works.

>> Whether the text itself is composed earlier or later is outside of my field
>> of expertise. The fact is, when you have fairly good archaeological
>> confirmation of the narrative from, say, the seventh century on, even if
>> the texts were composed based on oral narratives in tenth century spain,
>> those oral narratives were preserved accurately enough that they're worth
>> trusting.
>
> I sometimes voice the opinion, on Usenet, that some oral traditions
> have been shown to be extra-reliable - the ones I usually instance are
> the Vedic and Irish ones. On the few occasions people comment on this,
> it's usually to tell me that I misunderstand the exceptions.
> Basically, you *can't* get True History based solely on oral tradition,
> over more than a couple of centuries.

If so, it's going to be very difficult to put the composition of the OT at
much later than 600 at the outside. Or, at least those parts of the OT
that talk about what was happening politically in the region from the
period of Judges and on. It gets a great many things right, in terms of
names and dates and such, and very rarely says things that can be proven to
be wrong.

I'm certainly not a good enough historian to tell you if it's possible for
an oral tradition to preserve that kind of information for a five hundred
or a thousand years. But again, as far as I'm concerned, if it did, it
would be an oral tradition that would be essentially indistinguishable from
a text.

> Whether you can prove that your tradition is not sourced to something
> external is another matter. It'd be helpful if there were a signed
> document from, oh, Ahab's secretary or Solomon's army chief, in that
> crucial layer y'all are looking for, because that's the sort of thing
> even a brilliant hoaxer would be unlikely to get from post-Alexander
> archives or from inscriptions. But short of that - and we *do* have
> evidence that Baruch existed, don't we? - well, I don't see this
> getting solved.

Solved is something of a loose term. We've got things like multiple
mentions of Ahab in non-Israelite sources, we have the Assyrian accounts of
Sennachareb's adventures in Israel and Judah which are pretty close to the
biblical account, and so on. The later you go, the better the confirmatory
evidence is. It wouldn't surprise me to discover that there are people who
would deny the historicity of Ahab, so it's not that his historicity is a
solved problem. On the other hand, people who would do so aren't going to
be considered in the mainstream of scholarship.

It does seem unlikely that there's ever going to be a consensus on the time
at which the whole of the text was composed (barring the finding of a
really old scroll or two. Which isn't terribly likely, but then, Qumran
wasn't a terribly likely set of finds either.) However, there are a great
many individual points which are still in the air, and which can still be
determined, one way or another.

And, as you say, if what the archaeological minimalists, if I can use the
term, is confirmed, that would give some support to what the textual
minimalists are saying. If, on the other hand, they continue to give
ground, textual minimalism loses some support. Support which was never
terribly important to their claims, but support which was seized on quite
enthusiastically.

>>> I must admit that the last (of several) time I researched this, I wound
>>> up convinced that the best recentish "book for laymen" was Amy Dockser
>>> Marcus's <The View from Nebo>. Marcus is a journalist, not an
>>> archaeologist, but she doesn't usually stray into things that require
>>> her to know archaeology.
>>
>> I'd really like to be able to recommend a good archaeologically centered
>> "book for laymen" at this point. Unfortunately, I can't. It's not that
>> I've read the books that are out there and haven't liked them. It's that I
>> have a limited book budget, which tends to go for books I need in the
>> field, and for mass market SF paperbacks. (. . .)
>
> Do you have problems with the two-book series the first of which is by,
> um, Amihai Mazar? Given that I tend more to rad points of view, I
> *wanted* to prefer <The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land>, but I
> Just Couldn't.

Mazar was recommended to me, but I haven't had the budget or the sort of
burning need for the book that I've had for, say, Amiran. And I'll have to
admit that this whole area is a bit far from my chosen period, so it's not
something that I'm going to encounter in the course of the research which
I'm currently avoiding by posting to Usenet.

(. . .)

>> But what I meant to say was that the problem that the minimalists were
>> facing was that their narrative was opposed to the archaeological record.
>>
>> As I understand it, the minimalists were arguing as historians, and
>> pointing out flaws they saw in the biblical narrative. To the best of my
>> recollection, these flaws included: (. . .)
>
> Apparently the decisive book that converted Thompson, in particular, to
> "unhappy with but accepting of normal views" to "raging
> no-I'm-not-a-minimalist" was Lemche's <Canaanites>. I haven't made
> myself *read* <Canaanites> yet, but from skimming, the issue appears to
> be that there is a single word which Lemche is absolutely certain has
> to refer to people on Crete who were provably not there until sometime
> in the 400s BC. I am not making that up. But to be fair, Lemche also
> spends a fair amount of time basically eviscerating the Solomon-centred
> historiography of the 10th century BC that still tends to dominate
> discussions. (Sheesh, folks. Phoenicians and Philistines, and you
> want to talk about a buncha hillmen? Show some objectivity, please!)

The truth is, in the early years of Biblical Archaeology, there was a fair
amount of read the bible, and then dig based on that going on with sites of
that period. Now, whether or not the individual excavators are inclined to
believe or disbelieve the biblical accounts, they tend to dig first,
interpret what they've found, and then compare it to the texts. Which is,
at least in my opinion, a much healthier method of organizing excavations.
At least part of that is due to the minimalists' attack on the Biblical
narrative, so it's done some good, at least.

And, again, Finklestein and his disciples are really good field
archaeologists. They run orderly excavations, and publish their finds
quickly and well. While I may find some of his articles to argue beyond
the data, and in some cases, to argue poorly, he is a serious scholar in
the field, and not to be taken lightly. Unlike the minimalist historians,
who are clearly flaming nutjobs. Er, whose field I don't have sufficient
grounding in to comment on in depth.

(Camels)

>
>> And I do realize the changes that'll be made in the history of North Africa
>> based on those finds -- not many. The no camels in the bronze age story
>> has stuck too deep; the camel bones are going to be ignored for another
>> twenty years, if not longer.
>
> I'd like to call this pessimistic, but am not sure I can.

Well, if people were digging up buckets of camel bones from those strata,
the situation would change, and pretty rapidly. Maybe if there were three
or four other sites of that period which had those occasional camel bones
as well, there might be a change. But if people are still assuming no
camels in the bronze age twenty years after Wapnish published, it's pretty
clear that Wapnish isn't enough to end things.

Not that the camel bones aren't real; they're probably still in various
university labs, and people in the field could probably get access to them
without much trouble. They're just not enough.

(. . .)

>> As an aside, if all the biblical texts were written by second century
>> pranksters, they were really phenominal archaeologists. If they tried to
>> set their mythical unified monarchy fifty years earlier or a hundred years
>> later, the archaeological record would have given them the lie. They
>> managed to find the one time where questions could be raised about the
>> chronology to let them get away with it.
>>
>> I mean, this is in addition to being terrific linguists and historians.
>> It's sort of puzzling why they kept screwing around with faking texts, when
>> they could have just used a time machine and made history come out the way
>> they wanted it to have come out.

(Point about classics, which I'm not expert enough about to comment on)

> And use my own structures to show the improbability of the
> minimalist case. But I don't. Which leaves me
>
> a) looking for archaeological disproofs
> b) looking for linguistic disproofs
> c) seeing if anyone at all has any serious text-critical disproofs
> d) praying I don't have to end up agreeing with them.

Well, as far as (a) goes, there are limits to what can be accomplished.
There's always the option of "yes, well, on this particular point the text
is right, because it preserved an older tradition", to be recited whenever
something is verified.

(b) shouldn't be that hard to find, particular when you're trying to pick
the sort of low hanging fruit of arguments assuming that the text was
written all at once in post-Hasmonean period. For one thing, they did an
excellent job of keeping words descended from the Persian out of texts that
were supposed to be pre-Persian, which isn't something that can be done
easily unless you're a fairly sophisticated linguist. For another, the
language of, say, Deuteronomy and Esther are different, and they're
different in ways that are consistent with the supposedly older text being
older than the supposedly newer text. It's technically possible that there
were these post-Hasmonean Jews who had been studying comparative
linguistics, and who had reached a level of proficiency equal to that of
modern scholarship. It's also technically possible that the whole thing
was written by trained yaks in Tibet in the seventeenth century.

Still barring something really spectacular -- an eighth century BCE cache
of texts which included OT books would probably do it -- it's really
difficult to actually disprove these claims.
.

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