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[neilgodfrey]

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[StephenGoranson]

In the OP it was claimed that Elephantine remains indicated "that Persian era Jews knew nothing of the Pentateuch." Not so. Rather, *some* Egyptian Aramaic writers asked *others* for advice about Torah. That does not necessarily indicate that there was no Torah, anywhere, then, though it does suggest that that minority, on an island in Egypt, did not have a written copy of Hebrew Torah and also the ability to read and interpret it. "It" meaning the state of the text at that time; admittedly, significant portions of TaNaK, and revisions and so on, came later. Even today, someone somewhere is asking a rabbi if a certain choice would be kosher, torah-consistent. Perhaps compare the "ALL" in the thread title, ALL OT books, origin in Hellenistic era, with nothing. ALL and nothing being risky, sometimes tendentious, terms for history. Elephantine remains can be interpreted as affirmatively indicating a normative law. Why not written? Saying it "could be" only of such Hellenistic-origin date is not a strong argument, especially with the scant or no weight given by the asserting writer to earlier dated writing and archaeology.

Perhaps we can agree that various OT books have different dates of initial composition, or, in some cases, date ranges of cumulative composition, plus later canonization. NT and even the Koran were not instantly canonized. To assert that Torah was a collaborative totally very-short-duration project is mere special pleading, just saying collaboration is an imagined option, but evidence-less and implausible. Declaring a book could not be written in Persian times is similarly special pleading--of course it could. That all Elephantine-era temple priests lacked text sacred to them is also not plausible. If I recall correctly, not even NG accepts the Alexandria Library 270s bce Pentateuch-creation proposal.

That other books, such as the Iliad, the four Vedas, some Zoroastrian texts, and others, surely date before the earliest extant copies is widely-accepted fact. The long, diachronic history of the Hebrew language is also relevant here. The profile of extant texts can change radically, as the Qumran mss discoveries demonstrated by pushing back Torah scroll attestation by more than a thousand years; one might do well not to forget such. Yet the potential relevance of these examples is sometimes ignored, again via special pleading.

[andrewcriddle]

Hi Andrew. As you note, the this thread is not about Gmirkin's thesis nor about any of the biblical authors' knowledge of Plato. It is exclusively about the more basic question: the view that the biblical literature was the product of the Hellenistic era.

May I respond to some minor points and then one major one?

You write:

On the one hand we have no unambiguous pre-Hellenistic evidence for the Pentateuch.

My question: Do we have any evidence at all, even ambiguous evidence, for a pre-Hellenistic existence of the Pentateuch? I am, of course, referring to independent evidence (not the Pentateuch itself).

Other parts of the Hebrew Bible which are IMO probably from the exilic or Persian period seem to know the Pentateuch or some form of proto-Pentateuch

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It appears that your major sticking point is expressed here:

Apart from anything else the creation of a work that has all the signs of a long process of development and combination of different sources almost immediately before our earliest external evidence for its existence is IMO just not how things happen.

Yes, understood entirely. That has long been the one major sticking point. It was even addressed back in the early 1900s by a few brave souls who even then were suggesting a Hellenistic provenance for major sections of the biblical literature (not just Ecclesiastes or Daniel).

We have become so habituated to conceptualizing the OT as having "all the signs of a long process of development and a combination of different sources". The Hellenistic hypothesis does not dispute the "combination of different sources" but, as you know, proposes a different explanation for the data that has long been assumed to have had a gradual accretion over centuries.

In another thread I attempted to address, as one example, lengthy arguments relating to the evolution of the story of Noah's flood. As I saw it, our differences came down to our inability to move beyond the idea that differences implied long time of adaptation. My impression was that my interlocutor could not imagine any explanation other then long-term development. The notion of a collaborative effort of different schools appeared to be incomprehensible (that was my interpretation -- he may differ.) In a recent conference I was interested to hear one specialist repeat his observation that there was a time when Samaritans and Judeans did write a common text cooperatively, maintaining their differences within the one narrative.

Even the nature of Old Hebrew has been called into question. Yes, there was an Old Hebrew, but we also know that Hebrews were not the only ancient peoples who choses for certain literature to write in archaic styles to give an aura of antiquity. That's not a conspiracy theory -- it's how ancient peoples sometimes worked (scholars notice major periods of widespread love of antiquity in antiquity!). Old languages have been preserved for various types of texts even into relatively modern times, e.g. Latin.

I am reluctant to get into the issue of Old Hebrew given my minimal Hebrew. However our actual evidence of more-or-less successful imitation of ancient Hebrew are Hasmonean not early Hellenistic (the unusually good imitation in the Habakkuk pesher is late Hasmonean)

Andrew Criddle

[neilgodfrey]

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[neilgodfrey]

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[AdamKvanta]

... what evidence is there for the conquest of Canaan? One city's fall is hardly evidence of a conquest of Canaan as per the Bible.

I think it's a piece of solid evidence because the archaeology of Jericho matches the unique description of the city's fall in the Book of Joshua. Titus Kennedy also said there were other cities destroyed: https://youtu.be/jngjpuHM5b4?t=2112

If Canaan was conquered by Israelites then my understanding of the archaeological evidence that has been published and discussed would leave history with those invading Israelites embracing the same culture as the Canaanites ...

My understanding is similar even though I'm not sure to what degree was the Canaanite culture embraced by Israelites. Maybe some Israelites embraced it more, some less. But there is no doubt there was some embracement because even the author of 2 Kings 23:21–23 wrote that the judges didn't celebrate the Passover: "And the king commanded all the people, saying: 'Keep the passover unto the LORD your God, as it is written in this book of the covenant.' For there was not kept such a passover from the days of the judges that judged Israel, nor in all the days of the kings of Israel, nor of the kings of Judah; but in the eighteenth year of king Josiah was this passover kept to the LORD in Jerusalem."

Would my being mistaken about the conquest of Canaan have any impact on the argument for the dating of the Pentateuch or any of the biblical books?

One could argue that the main core of the Pentateuch was written in the 15th century during the Exodus (if the historicity of the Exodus is plausible). But I didn't want to derail this thread into the question of the historicity of the Exodus. I just wanted to show that there are some arguments for its historicity.

[neilgodfrey]

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[neilgodfrey]

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