Nomad, you're deliberately making a mountain out of a molehill. And the books you cite still don't contradict Carrier's assertion. Which was, after all, in the context of whether there was a purpose to be served by publishing the book under review.

Also, I dealt with footnotes above. Perhaps you missed it. Here it is again. What you're talking about is your personal preference, which is fine as far as it goes. But, general interest is a recognized publishing segment with different conventions. Ken Davis' Don't Know Much About The Bible and Gleason Archer's Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties are better examples of bible scholarship aimed at laymen. Neither, of course, has footnotes.

As I said above, can't you do any better than constantly slashing at the honesty, intelligence and methods of every scholar with whom you disagree? Not only is it inappropriate, after a while it ceases to be effective. Think of the boy who cried wolf.

[This message has been edited by JubalH (edited June 04, 2001).]

Yes, it happened on a different thread. I don't remember where and it seems unnecessary to actually find it.

You are not the first person to make this observation.

Agreed.

Toto

This is getting silly. Dever's book has a publishing date in March, 2001, in response to the Finkelstein book, but has just become available. Carrier's review was written about that time. For Nomad to include it on a list of books that Carrier overlooked is a pretty low blow.

Richard Carrier

I never say this. Didn't you read my reply? Read it again please, and stop attributing claims to me that I have never made.

Regarding endnotes, whatever the norm may be in Biblical lay texts (I haven't surveyed everything out in the last three years), in the publishing industry in general, across all fields, this is a dying trend. In the past three years there have been hundreds of books out that no longer do this, and you can see that the trend was already underway in the previous ten years, as footnotes became unpopular, then endnotes scarcer even when used. I myself was told point blank by a publisher: don't send me manuscripts with footnotes, and if you can avoid endnotes please do. Like it or not, lament it or not, this is what is happening.

FYI to anyone following (or tripping across) the discussion between Meta and me regarding his use of authority. Given that the discussion at this point has little to do wich this forum, and in deference to rodahi, I have opened a new topic in Miscellaneous Discussions, Metacrock the Scholar.

I have copied the fish story into the new topic, and have provided a similar elucidation (with quotes) of the big bang cosmology issue. Anyone with thoughts on either subject, or a similar anecdote to relate, is invited to visit the new topic.

I did read it Richard, and since the phrase "complete synthetic history" can be made to mean just about anything, I saw your quibble as meaningless here.

Now, have you, or have you not read Who Wrote the Bible? 1997 edition? If you have, why did you say that it was a book on textual criticism but not the history of Israel? If you have not read it, why do you characterize it as not meeting your ambiguous standard of dealing with a "complete synthetic history of Israel"? Are you familiar with the work of Richard Elliot Freidman, or any of the other authors I cited in my post?

At the same time, if you will define what yo meant by this phrase, then that might help. Perhaps it was so limited in scope, that The Bible Unearthed is the only title that could hope to qualify.

If you are now confining your argument to a recent trend that extends back all of 3 years, why did you not mention this important point in your review? Further, why would the trend in non-historical fields have any bearing on this discussion, or your criticism of Dever? Finally, you made the demand (or even the expectation) for end notes and foot notes sound like it is a bad thing. If it is a very recent trend (i.e. no older than 3 years), then perhaps it is merely a fad, and will be successfully resisted. Surely something as important as specific citations and actual quotations from the works of others is something worth defending. Two recent examples discussed on these boards (The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, and The Jesus Puzzle) apparently both do this, as did a previous book called The Jesus Mysteries. Of course, in the latter case, it was the referenced sources (and the sloppy and selective methods used by Freke and Grady in using those sources) that sank this latter work like a stone.

I hope that the scholarly community continues to demand the highest standards from those who would wish to participate in informed discussion of the Bible and its history. I do not believe I am the only one to hold to this hope.

Brian

Richard Carrier

It is not my fault you are so reading impaired that a precise phrase can "mean just about anything" to you. Complete: covering the entire history of Israel (I lament already in that review that they only go up to the intertestamental period, but otherwise they're account is complete, including pre-Biblical times). Synthetic: combining all sources and evidence and arguing from objective historical, hypothetical reasoning. History of Israel: a history of the nation and people of the general region of Israel. Not the meaning of one book, or the historical background for that book, or the history of that book's creation, but a history of Israel, for which the Bible is but a source, not the purpose of the book.

I don't think anyone else here needed me to explain this as if I were talking to a teenager, but since you have egregiously misread plain sentences of mine before, I am hardly surprised.

Now, have you, or have you not read Who Wrote the Bible? 1997 edition?

I already answered this--in another thread, where this issue actually began--but you didn't read what I said then. Why should I expect you to read it again? What's the point in repeating myself? I am not going to waste my time talking to a wall.

On End Notes: Dever attacked this one book, rather than the trend. Had he done the latter I would have been right next to him. But he made it appear as if this were something new and uniquely at fault in this book. That is something only a biased and unfair critic would do. Instead, whereas I always said this was a trend in lay literature, true to your blockheaded form you never read anything I say and so stupidly cited several examples of non lay works. What the hell are you on? Crack?


[This message has been edited by Richard Carrier (edited June 08, 2001).]