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[StephenGoranson]

Different views, "hard hearted"?
In the title of this thread,
"Why the Hellenistic era for ALL 'Old Testament' books should be taken seriously,"
do note the word "should."
So far, justifications offered for that bold claim (e.g., "ALL" is bold) have been mostly "could."

[neilgodfrey]

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[neilgodfrey]

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[StephenGoranson]

Dismissing the fact that the earliest known manuscript does not date an origin shows bias.
Merely asserting that x in your opinion is more Greek than Near Eastern is undemonstrated so weightless.

[Russell Gmirkin]

When we apply the fundamentals of historical methods as practised by historians in fields other than biblical studies we quickly see logical flaws at the heart of the conventional understanding of that the sources for various biblical books (in particular the stories in Genesis and Exodus) go back as far as the times of David and Solomon.

Multiple sources and circularity

Several times I have engaged in EarlyWritings on the question of the Documentary Hypothesis and every time, it seems to me, the argument submitted to "prove" the validity of the DH has been a point by point demonstration of how multiple sources were combined to create a new single story: e.g. how two different narratives were combined to compose the story of the great flood in Genesis. Each time I have attempted to make it clear that I have no doubt that different sources were mixed to create the Genesis Flood account, but a pre-Hellenistic antiquity of the biblical flood story does not logically follow from the fact of such a mix.

Hi Neil.

I'm not sure if you are aware of the following article that may be relevant to this discussion:

Can the Documentary Hypothesis be Rehabilitated? A New Model of the Collaborative Composition of the Pentateuch
Journal of Higher Criticism, 2020

https://www.academia.edu/45052192/Can_t ... Pentateuch

"Throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, higher criticism's identification of JEDPH sources provided a then-compelling model for the literary development of the Pentateuch. Since the 1970s, the acknowledgment of serious difficulties in the Documentary Hypothesis have undermined the earlier consensus and led to a number of competing models, several of which deny the viability of separating out distinct JEDPH sources. In the present article, I call into question a central feature of Documentary and Supplementary Hypotheses, namely that the JEDPH sources represent different historical stages in the creation of the Pentateuch. Instead, I propose a new model in which these represent contemporary literary voices in the collaborative creation of the Pentateuch by a team of authors. This new model allows for a new interpretation of the JEDPH sources that overcomes the various objections raised against the Documentary Hypothesis in recent years."

In this article I discuss the literary critical evidence for the existence of JEDPH sources as well as closely related evidence that shows they cannot be put into sequential order, but are in fact interrelated and intertwined. This leads to the straightforward conclusion that these sources were roughly contemporary, consistent with my model of the Pentateuch as a collaborative literary project with multiple authors.

[Russell Gmirkin]

Here is another demonstration of the circularity in the dating of Deuteronomy to the time of (or before) Josiah.

On a similar note, I did an in-depth literary study of 2 Kings 21-25 in another article that is highly relevant to the dating of JEDP sources.

The Manasseh and Josiah Redactions of 2 Kings 21-25
Journal of Higher Criticism, 2022

https://www.academia.edu/82084563/The_M ... ings_21_25

"This article outlines evidence for the existence of two major redactions of Kings that replaces the dual redaction theory of the Cross school. The oldest literary stratum, the Manasseh Redaction (DtrM), dated no earlier than the fall of Jerusalem in 585 BCE, schematically portrayed all the last kings from Manasseh to the fall of Jerusalem as uniformly wicked. The book of Jeremiah, which knew nothing of a righteous Josiah or of Deuteronomistic reforms, provides key external literary evidence for the existence of the Manasseh Redaction. The account of the last kings of Judah in 2 Kgs 21-25 in DtrM reads smoothly as a consistent negative account of the approaching divine punishment of Jerusalem for the sins of Manasseh. The Josiah Redaction (DtrJ), of even later date, inserted a new and entirely fictional portrait of Josiah as a righteous king and a Deuteronomistic reformer. The DtrJ additions contain systematic literary dependence on the older DtrM materials, while the reverse is never the case, showing the relative sequence of these contradictory traditions. • An immediate consequence is that DtrJ does not bear contemporary historical witness to events in the time of Josiah as commonly supposed. • A second consequence is to definitively remove the traditional argument that dates the introduction of the Deuteronomic law code to the time of Josiah. • A third consequence is to allow the possibility that all the materials in the Hebrew Bible attributed to the so-called Deuteronomistic School may be near-contemporary rather than a product of centuries of literary activity as commonly proposed."

My arguments for DtrM and DtrJ redactions (which some scholars in a discussion on Academia.edu found quite convincing) pretty much kills the idea that Deuteronomy was introduced ca. 612 BCE under Josiah based on 2 Kings 22-23 in order to justify this Deuteronomistic reforms. The glowing portrait of Josiah as Deuteronomistic reformer in 2 Kings 23 post-dates DtrM, which was in turn written no earlier than the fall of Jerusalem ca. 585 BCE. And indeed there is nothing to prevent a Hellenistic Era date for both DtrM and DtrJ in line with other research on the late date of Genesis-Kings.

[Russell Gmirkin]

Please note that I don't have time to engage further in this discussion at present. I ran across this thread & thought the two articles above might be valuable resources for those seriously interested in the subject matter.

[StephenGoranson]

In a view of a long duration of copying and variant mss a "roughly contemporary" origin proposal is both unnecessary and quite improbable.

[Russell Gmirkin]

In a view of a long duration of copying and variant mss a "roughly contemporary" origin proposal is both unnecessary and quite improbable.

And yet my article presents arguments (which you dismiss without reading) that such a hypothesis is absolutely necessary. I think Neil's opening remarks on arguments and evidence are highly relevant, but I will leave it at that.

[StephenGoranson]

Russell, you do not know what I have read.
But run if you wish.