Peter Kirby

No, not that kind of dating...

I need to assign ranges of dates (or centuries) to the Hebrew Bible and Apocrypha (Deuterocanon). This is for the revision of the Early Jewish Writings site. This will allow the visitor to browse through documents in a roughly chronological order.

If you would like to supply partial or complete lists of the plausible range of dates for the books of the HB and Apocrypha, please reply and post them here.

And, no, I'm not backsliding here--completing the site revision for EJW is part of my goals.

thanks muchly,
Peter Kirby

spin

Hi Peter.

I think you're asking for something which doesn't have much sense given the current state of the art. Absolute dates are impossible to provide in a climate in which evidence dictates. The earliest forms we have come from Qumran and, while the texts are obviously older, we have no solid means of saying how much older.

(I know someone might want to recall for example a citation from the torah which goes back to the 1st temple period, yet we don't know at all that it is a citation from the torah: it's a bit like trying to date the gospels on a saying like "do unto others as they would do unto you".)

Whereas I would have no trouble dating everything from the post-exilic era down to after Josephus's time, a lot of people would find this extreme, though I have no trouble doubting the ability for people at sword point to stop to collect their favourite texts to take of into exile. Just a moment, I need to get my copy of..STAB.. aaaarrrgh. You won't be wanting whatever it was any more.

I was thinking of the possibility of creating a relative chronology as some works assume earlier ones, eg Ezra accepts some notion of the torah or Ezekiel cites Zephaniah, etc., which would help to map development, but then what form was the torah when the Ezra text was dealing with it? The torah itself reveals layers of composition. Isaiah ostensibly has three layers to it, though this is certainly an oversimplification.

If you do a comparison between Kings and Chronicles, you find that the latter refers to the Levites much more frequently than Kings, while there is no increase in interest for priests. Now the priesthood will have had control over the means of textual transmission throughout most of the period we called post-exilic, so when was Chronicles written?? It shares a large fragment with Nehemiah, though Josephus only knows a variant form of the early part of Nehemiah, the so-called memoir, yet Josphus had enormous literary resources at his disposal, as his texts reveal elsewhere.

If it's more traditional writing dates you're after, you could go for the literalist approach, warning those interested that that's what you're doing. It's easy and all you'd have to do is supply a few caviats.


spin

Peter Kirby

Is there anything approaching academic orthodoxy here? What are the ranges of opinion?

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

Chris Weimer

spin - quick question. Suppose, perhaps, that the exiles did not take with them anything into Babylon. Is it possible that they already had some texts, assuredly not in their current form, yet nonetheless visible, before the exile, and when they returned, since the "Empty Land" wasn't really empty, they proceded to amass and redact the writings then?

spin

I'm sure there is. I'd guess that a majority of scholars would see the bulk of the torah written before the exile with the priestly elements not long after the return, Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles within one or two hundred years of the return. Kings before Chronicles. Kings, Samuel, and all the "Deuteronomistic History" written in the same period... I wouldn't have a clue about their date ranges though as I think it's all a crock...


spin

spin

Anything is possible, Chris. There may have been texts, but where would they have been kept? Writing was a priviledged skill in those days, so very few would have access to texts. If you have a look at texts found in various sites, it's often luck that they were preserved, and, with the exception of Egypt where there was a vastly more stable context, always as tablets or monumental inscriptions. We don't know if the Jerusalemites used scrolls or tablets. When Jerusalem was destroyed, what could have survived that they could have refound? I'm only arguing the main chance though, which is what I think we must.


spin

Anat

spin, if all the composition is post-exillic, what would have been the raw data? Do you think there were lists names and dates for the rule of the various kings or did a later author make them up to suit his ideology?

spin

There is certainly some information that has survived from before the exile. There is some certain historical data from at least Hezekiah's time, but how much of that is recollection, I cannot say. I think that the books of Kings as we have them are quite late (and Chronicles even later), so they must have been based on earlier efforts. Who would normally keep records of kings but kings?

David fits into a tradition history which is easily accommodated by an oral maintenance. Solomon is a much simpler collection and is a few tales plus the building of the temple and the palace with his dealings with Hiram and then the queen of Sheba. Many of the Judan kings are formulae applied to either no, or very scant, information. By formulae I consider the Kings example:

• name
• father
• mother's name
• length of reign
• evaluation (he did what was good/bad in the eyes of the lord)
• deeds (if any)
• interesting traditions (if any)
• burial

That's enough to account for almost all kings mentioned.

Short answer:

1. traditions
2. recollections
3. formulae, and
4. fabrication

spin

CJD

I would consider "exaggeration" an emendation on the last point.

Chris Weimer

It would be rather easy to find the left-over writings in areas not ravaged by the Babylonians, which I recall is another part of your theory, no?