Apikorus

Thanks.

Look at 3:23, which also has WBn but clearly refers to a group of three, since the total count is explicitly stated at the end of the verse.

This is a pretty common hypothesis. See any standard commentary, e.g. Japhet. To make sense of 3:21 would require several such fixes in succession, though.

Incidentally, don't you figure the terminus ad quem for Chronicles has to be mid-2nd century given that the Greek translation is referred to by Eupolemus?

spin

What is indicated in the Dead Sea Scrolls is that the scribe who didn;t make a clear distinction between WAW and YOD knew what was going on. It was obviously the later scribes who didn't.

I wouldn't mind seeing what say Japhet has to say on the matter!

It seems fairly simple if one understands the lack of clear distinction between WAW and YOD orthography, which is of course just another marker of great lateness.

That works on the assumption that what Eupolemus was referring to was actually Chronicles. There is a fragment from Qumran that has been attributed to Chronicles, yet it is no Chronicles that we have seen, in that the tiny fragment has things similar and others dissimilar to Chronicles, which may indicate the earlier source for both Sam/Kings and Chronicles.


spin