How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study by Ronald Hendel and Jan Joosten

Abstract

Reviewed by: How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study by Ronald Hendel and Jan Joosten Samuel Boyd ronald hendel and jan joosten, How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study (AYBRL; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). Pp. xvi + 221. $45. The study of the Hebrew Bible can be conducted from a dizzying array of perspectives. As graduate students quickly learn, achieving a reasonable time for earning a degree often requires specialization immediately, or soon, in order to become competent enough to contribute to a given area of research on this anthology of texts. It is this state of affairs that Ronald Hendel and Jan Joosten identify as one of the lamentable situations that have led to poor evaluations of the possibilities of examining Biblical Hebrew linguistically, and therefore the literature of the Hebrew Bible, from a diachronic perspective. As a consequence, the authors wrote this volume as a partial remedy to address this situation. The result is a readable, accessible, and (from my perspective) successful volume, demonstrating that there are value and payoff, even in light of many uncertainties, in applying linguistic theory to explore the relative and absolute chronologies of biblical texts. In chap. 1, the authors establish that languages change over time and that traces of these changes are discernible in the written record. H. and J. utilize the successive development from the qal passive to niphal forms, as well as the change in orthography in which certain plene forms are characteristic of spellings in texts that were also composed later. In chap. 2, they examine the types of language change that occur diachronically, and what these changes indicate about the dating of texts. In chap. 3, the authors cover how scholars can classify such language variation, whether variation is due to style, register, or true diachronic change. The authors address the issue of textual variation in chap. 4 and demonstrate the manner in which texts and manuscripts reveal how later scribes could update the language of older texts through scribal transmission; nonetheless, H. and J. argue that these examples do not diminish (and, in fact, can support) the possibility of using language to date the original composition of biblical texts. Chapter 5 contains a synthesis of what the epigraphic record of Hebrew, as found in ostraca and inscriptions, tells us about the dating of biblical texts. H. and J. are careful to point out where such comparisons also have their [End Page 709] limitations, especially with respect to issues of genre and register. In chap. 6, the authors then examine the category "Transitional Biblical Hebrew," showing how these texts contain both older elements and younger, innovative features. They conclude that the texts in Transitional Biblical Hebrew nonetheless constitute an identifiable stage in the development of the language, and that the mixture of earlier and later elements does not prevent the scholar from classifying these texts in a diachronic spectrum. In chap. 7, H. and J. address "pseudoclassicisms," using examples from much of the previous research that has appeared in J.'s publications elsewhere. Here they demonstrate how later authors attempt to mimic older stages of the language but in ways that betray that these later authors do not always replicate accurately earlier forms of the language. Perhaps one of the more valuable chapters is the last one, chap. 8, titled "Consilience and Cultural History." Here H. and J. demonstrate how their linguistic explorations in the preceding chapters find support through other considerations. Using the category consilience, in which multiple, unrelated lines of evidence are utilized to show the likelihood (if not persuasiveness) of a thesis, the authors establish how a variety of historical data supports their view that dating on linguistic grounds actually reveals both the relative and the absolute chronology of the biblical texts. They invoke Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions, population statistics, and other lines of evidence to demonstrate that linguistic reconstructions and analyses do, indeed, correlate on independent lines with other factors for consideration. Appendix 1 is a highly useful list of publications that employ linguistic approaches to examine various parts of the Hebrew Bible. H. and J. wisely make the bibliography a sample and...