pharoah

This is a typical fundy debating tactic, to try to discredit an entire theory by ridicule.

You also won't find the book of Jasher and the book of the histories of the kings. So by your own argument the writers of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles must have made them up. :huh:

Nice ad-hom. This is in fact an accurate description of conservative theory. THey assume that Moses wrote the text just because it says so, and are forced to come up with convoluted explanations to deal with the overwhelming evidence against this hypothesis.

What people are you referring to and what's your evidence that they considered them to be single authors? Keep in mind that Jesus, Paul and the NT authors were too far removed in time from the events in question to be considered reliable sources.

Please present here what you think is Wilson's stongest evidence against the DH AND for Mosiac authorship. If it's compelling, or even raises strong questions, I promise to go buy the book.

Mary.

Wow - thanks everyone! This gives me a lot to investigate.

Mary.

dongiovanni1976x

I second that.

Toto

Do you mean A Survey of Old Testament Introduction (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Gleason L. Archer? (searchable on Amazon)

Dean Anderson

It's not a book. It's an essay.

Here is an online version of the whole text.

rob117

If the entire Bible is post-exilic, how do you explain the details that would have only been known in the Iron Age? For example, how would a post-exilic writer know details such as Assyrian military titles (e.g. the tartan [Isaiah 20:1]; the rabshakeh [Isaiah 36-39; II Kings 18-20]), the names of minor foreign kings (i.e. Baalis King of Ammon [Jer. 40:14], and Mesha King of Moab, for the former see this article, page 55), how would the prophetic books know details such as Sargon II's invasion of Ashdod (Isa. 20:1), and the exact reignal years of the events of Nebuchadnezzar's reign? Why is it that the Deuteronomistic History appears to be a piece of propaganda for an Iron Age king? Why do we see a pattern of linguistic development within the Bible, with some biblical books using Iron Age vocabulary and others using Persian and Hellenistic period vocabulary (here)?

The final redaction of the Pentateuch as well a most of the other books were post-exilic. Nobody denies that. But older written sources must have been available for use in order to get details that otherwise would not have been known. Compare the Bible to Herodotus who, using oral accounts almost exclusively, is not accurate for events much more than a century before his lifetime- for example, he has Nitocris mother of Nabonidus as a ruler of Babylon in her own right, a situation which is not historical. Nabonidus ruled from 556-539 BC, little more than a century before Herodotus's lifetime (Herodotus was born around 484 BC and wrote The Histories towards the end of his life around 425 BC).

aChristian

Yes.

aChristian

The essay is an excellent introduction and the introduction to the essay is an excellent short biography on Wilson..
He wrote at least two books that I am aware of: A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament and Studies in the Book of Daniel.

spin

You may as well answer why the Prayer of Nabonidus was found at Qumran, why the biblical texts continued to talk about the Philistines long after they ceased to be a real meaningful entity, why some prophecies hopelessly mix up past periods, why the bible knows of the Philistines but not when they arrived, why Daniel gets Nebuchadnezzar going into the wilderness and not Nabonidus, why the hellenistic writer felt the need to set his Judith story at the time of Nebuchadnezzar when he was apparently dealing with the time of Seleucid oppression.

Tradition is quite a strange thing in what it keeps and what it doesn't. The post you responded to dealt with when texts were written, not when traditions were formed.

I didn't know that John Hyrcanus was from the Iron Age.

Hurvitz attempts to create a case by making categorical assumptions about epigraphy and their relation with Hebrew (for example, was the Gezer "calendar" written in a dialect of Hebrew or Phoenician?) and he was writing in a more friendly atmosphere towards unprovenanced artefacts (why is the Mesha Stone similar to biblical Hebrew and why have we found so little Moabite?). Linguistic arguments that have no solid historical pins are not convincing. Mishnaic Hebrew was once thought to be a much later form of Hebrew until the Qumran scrolls showed the assumption to be wrong. What is clear from Qumran is that there were different dialects in Hebrew that were productive at the same time. If philologists can be in error of hundreds of years regarding when Mishnaic Hebrew was being used (and how much earlier than Qumran times did it first raise its head?), or when the Aramaic of say Daniel was written, you shouldn't put much weight on linguistic arguments that don't in themselves carry much hard evidence at all.

(And I think a few were post-second temple.)

What sources do you imagine were carried into exile?

That's selective use of Herodotus though. Herodotus was as good as his sources. His methodology was to deal mainly with his own time and included extra material for compendiousness. However, he gives useful information about Lydia dealing with centuries before the time of Nabonidus. Oral accounts can preserve information from the distant past. The problem is that it can/will be incorporated into tradition.


spin

spin

I'll let these words from Archer's introduction speak for themselves: