New Book: How Old Is the Hebrew Bible?

In How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study (Yale, 2018), Ronald Hendel and Jan Joosten provide an accessible treatment of some of the complex issues regarding inquiry into the history of the Hebrew Bible. In short, they are convinced that within the Hebrew Bible there is a traceable diachrony from Classical Biblical Hebrew (CBH; texts dated to the monarchy) to Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH; texts dated to the Persian period). The book is only 221 pages. It is not intended to be a full or complete study of all of the evidence but it does present some intriguing arguments for its thesis.

My interest in the book goes beyond the linguistic to the textual critical. In chapter 4, the authors address “Textual History and Linguistic History.” They state the problem plainly, “Textual variation interferes with diachronic linguistics” (p. 47). However, the situation is not hopeless in the eyes of the authors. The Masoretic Text is “notoriously layered” (p. 48) and the MT’s vowel pointing at times does preserve evidence of a later grammatical development (cf. Isa 1:12; p. 49), but our authors conclude, “Textual criticism and diachronic linguistics complement each other. The judicious combination of the two approaches paves the way to a correct understanding of the text” (p. 50, and similar on p. 53 regarding the consonantal text).

So how do we know whether we are reading early or late Biblical Hebrew in any one narrative or book? Under “The Criterion of Accumulation,” the authors say that the comprehensive difference between CBH and LBH could hardly be the result of textual corruption. Rather, only an accumulation of late features can date a text as late (cf. ch. 3). That is, early texts may contain anomalous late linguistic features due to sporadic linguistic modernization. The authors final assessment of the Masoretic Text in this regard is worth quoting in full:

The fact is that the MT of Isaiah and the Pentateuch does not exhibit this modernizing profile. On the whole, the MT is a rather conservative and well-preserved text. Occasional modernizations exist, but they did not affect the MT to the extent of making the diachronic approach impossible (p. 55).

They close the chapter with a section on Textual Criticism and Redaction Criticism, which addresses the matter of different literary editions; that is, textual change not due to scribal mistakes and modernizing versions (pp. 56–57).

The authors conclude the chapter as follows:

When textual criticism is brought into the picture, it has the global effect of confirming the diachronic approach. The textual history of the Hebrew Bible provides an explanation for occasional “false positives,” late features occurring in a relatively early text. In addition, such late features in the CBH corpus can often be shown to have entered the text secondarily, as scribal mistakes, as occasional modernizations, or as products of textual growth. Textual criticism and historical linguistics  reinforce one another, and together contribute to a better understanding of the biblical text (p. 59).

I’m only part way through chapter 5 of the book, but overall, the authors are to be commended for their treatment and presentation of the matter of historical linguistics and its relationship to TC. I plan to write a follow-up post attempting to engage the authors on one of their examples from chapter 4 with a view to show how they think diachony and TC work together.