Loan words and OT Dating
Our very own Hank, from Think-Wink, linked to בלשנות (balshanut), which is a biblical linguistics blog, on the topic of loan words in the Hebrew Bible. There the claim is made that:
Some scholars have argued that Biblical Hebrew was never a fully spoken language, but was an artificial literary language created by post-exilic scribes. For instance, Ullendorff’s paper “Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?” BSOAS 34 (1971): 241-55, Knauf’s “War ‘Biblisch-Hebräisch’ eine Sprache?” ZAH 3 (1990): 11-23, and North’s “Could Hebrew Have Been A Cultic Esperanto?” ZAH 12: 202-17. In this article, Eskhult argues that if BH is an artificial language created only in post-exilic times, then loanwords ought to be fairly equally distributed throughout the various books and genres contained in the Bible…
[However], the Akkadian, Egyptian, and Persian loanwords seem to follow the pattern of the political history described by the biblical texts. It is difficult to explain such a connection if the language was artificial and late. Further, Perisan loanwords abound within the books that are obviously late, but do not appear at all in the Pentateuch.
For those of you following along at home, this is important because it suggests the tradition behind the biblical text dates to the periods and cultures from which the text itself claims to be writing, compared to being composed entirely as an after-thought.
It amazes me how much biblical scholarship is moving away from much of what form criticism has argued strongly for over 100 years ago. As more light in linguistics, archaeology, history etc. has shown through, the more scholars are seeing that form criticism, in much of what it argued for, was just wrong due to the fact that those scholars did not have all the facts (which is not necessarily their fault, they made their theories with the information available; they just may have jumped the gun). I have really noticed this in both OT and NT scholarship, both in conservative and more moderate to liberal camps. Form criticism is loosing its grip on biblical scholarship in that the conclusions drawn from it are being seriously challenged and rejected.
But, I still realize that form criticism isn’t totally gone away as that discipline did shed some important light for scholars. Also, one cannot base the date of a text solely on linguistics. There are other factors. One just needs to take the linguistics into account when dating and studying a book.