aChristian

I am not ignoring you. I will get back when I get more time, hopefully before they drop this thread.

judge

No worries, take your time if need be.

Anat

So one major objection to a pre-exilic written source is that there was no way such a source could have made it from Jerusalem to Babylon under conditions of forced exile. I suggest the following hypothesis: That pre-exilic writen document(s) existed, combining traditions from Judah and Israel. (We know of literacy from Hezakiah's times, Finkelstein concludes that some 50% of the population of Judah in Hezekiah's times consisted of refugees from the north, based on changes in population sizes, and there would have been motivation to form a single national identity in light of continued Assyrian attack - so both the means and motive existed.) Such a written source may not have made it in one piece into Babylonian exile, but the first opportunity they had, the exiles reconstructed their written source from memory to the best of their ability. If there was movement of individuals from Judah to Babylon that was less strenuous then a forced march (and I think there was - wasn't there archaeological evidence that Jehoiachin received earnings from his lands in Judah while in exile?) they could have brought with them written materials too. An anomally like the story of the Tower of Babel, which seems like it had to be written in exile, but has a notion of a deity that is very similar to the one in Genesis 2-3 and Genesis 18-19, a deity that is not omniscent and fears competition from humans might be an early addition to the reconstructed source.

Does this make any sense?

pharoah

There are other problems with this objection as well:

1) It appears to assume that everyone was taken into captivity. This is not true. Even the bible states that some people were left behind in Judah.

2) It appears to assume that all sources would have been taken to Babylon. This needs to be proven, not assumed.

Anat

I have been thinking about your points pharoah, and how they relate to my thoughts above. The archaeological evidence supports an exile of a significant part of the population from Jerusalem and its immediate environs, not the rest of Judah. Obviously most of the scribes would have been in that area, but if a text composed in Jerusalem was intended for kingdom-wide propaganda wouldn't there have been copies sent to other cities? Such copies could have remained in use until the return of the exiles with their 'new improved version'. OTOH I suppose the atmosphere in Judah must have been quite despodent, faith in any form of Yahwism would have been low, so they may have fallen out of use. So it's hard to tell what I would expect.

Addressing your second point would depend on where the redaction of the sources took place.

rob117

Somehow the sources seemed to have been carried into exile. Ezekiel quotes P word-for-word at some points. Gerald a Larue (Old Testament Life and Literature) stipulates that Ezekiel communicated his prophecies to Jerusalem from Babylon via courier, so there is no reason to doubt that documents could make it from Judah to Babylon.

Anat

Unless P was composed in exile. Which raises another question - I can accept my scenario of reconstructing an older recently lost source of poetry or short stories, even a longer storyline (which would probably require more ad hoc gap filling and streamlining) but not for the detailed genealogies found in P or in Chronicles, nor the detailed geographical details (as well as lengths of reign) of the Deuteronomist History. Even if whole texts as we know them didn't make the way from Jerusalem to Babylon, some kind of written source materials did.

aChristian

We should read the version which the majority of manuscripts supports as being the original. The article fails to point out that the missing verses in I Samuel are not missing in the Alexandrine manuscript. Just because some manuscripts of a later translation of the original hebrew into greek leave out part of the story does not prove there were two stories. The Septuagint just doesn't have the credentials of the MT.
The article fails to establish that there are two stories. It has the all the problems I already mentioned. Everyone back then familiar with the biblical text knew the traditional authors were the actual authors. It is only after there is enough time to get away with it that anyone attempted to make up a story about multiple authors. It doesn't fly in my opinion. In fact, it really appears wacko to me. You really should read the article by Wilson. He exposes the ignorance, dishonesty, or sloppiness of the some of the major scholarly proponents of the theory.

lenrek

<sorry>

judge

OK lets have a look at just one of the inconsistencies mentioned in the article.

from here


Is there anything "wacko" about this explanation?

Is there a better explanation that that there were two stories merged into one?

thanks.