Category Archives: Biblical Studies

I’m receiving some interesting feedback on an essay of mine on Number Multiplication in the Historical Books of the Old Testament over on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog.

The series starts with Jim Snapp’s essay The Quest for the Historical Census, and continues with P. J. Williams’ post The case against the reduction of large numbers, followed by Jim Snapp’s Defending a Case for the Reduction of Large Numbers, then P. J. Williams’ Keep ’em large, and ending thus far, with Jim Snapp’s A Second Reply in Defense of Reduced Census-Numbers, several of which messages I’ve peppered with comments of my own, particularly the last.

I obviously agree with Jim Snapp that the numbers need to be reduced if they are to be held to represent the reality of the times they ostensibly describe. I differ with him in his method of reconstituting the orginal numbers. He uses a variation of the Mendenhall method (“thousands” and “chiefs”/”bands” having the same spelling in Hebrew, אלפים,the meanings were confused at some point). I rather see within the text itself evidence (1 Kings 4.26 compared to 1 Chronicles 9.25 started it all off) that a multiplication by 10 or 100, depending upon circumstances, has occurred in order to keep the population numbers near a certain preconceived number, and to inflate most other numbers as well. The Assyrians, we know, used precisely the same tactic (see especially Marco de Odorico, The Use of Numbers and Quantifications in the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions. State Archives of Assyria Studies 3. Helskinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 1995). This deliberate, centralized alteration of texts at a point before they were widely known is apparently something that some people have an issue with. I see it as a mistaken instance of scribal “correction” to be corrected. Others, like P. J. Williams, see the population numbers as representative of a trope of sorts, representing the fulfillment of the “be fruitful and multiply” command in Genesis 1.28. One wonders what chariot stalls have to do with fruitful human reproduction, or heads of cattle, amounts of silver, wheat, etc. Indeed, since the trope is never explicitly commented upon, I find it dubious. Also, I find the Mendenhall approach dubious because it is never clear at what point in this theory the confusion was supposed to occur. Pre-exilic numbers in lists were written using a form of Egyptian numeric annotation, not fully written out. Even if they were written out fully, and words were confused with numbers, in what context was this to have happened? It would need to be several steps removed from the text we have, as the numbers are totalled and treated solely as numbers in the text as it stands. Even more importantly, the Penatateuchal military census numbers are not the only ones in the Hebrew Bible exhibiting inflation, but it is a phenomenon that persists throughout almost the entirety of the historical books.

One of the interesting and kind of fun things that happens in reducing the numbers according to my scheme is that in the Exodus, the number of people of Israel and others participating in the original will have been less than the number of people involved in Cecil B. DeMille’s movie version!

Anyhow, it’s a subject I find fascinating, and I’m glad others are interested in it, too.

Since I’ve got a bit of time, and the plaster dust of renovation in stately biblicalia manor has settled to a degree, it’d be good to respond to Kevin Wilson’s last post over at Blue Cord. He’s got links there to all the back and forth over this, so see there for that.

Let me first air a clarification. I think Kevin may be supposing that my position is that I deny all development of all texts in the Hebrew Bible, but that’s not so. My position is still apparently one which is apparently quite outrageous to someone highly involved in source critical issues. Namely, while I do believe that the documents we possess in our various collections called the Bible did experience growth and alteration through several centuries, I do not believe that source criticism is sufficiently or appropriately nuanced in its work, and, for other reasons, believe that it is quite impossible to predict what those earlier sources looked like. I think source critics, particularly those working in the Documentary Hypothesis tradition, are wasting their time on scholarly pie in the sky. There are many others who believe the same thing, and this has been the case for a number of years, with the rise of various alternatives to the classical Documentary Hypothesis. As for comparative data, it is quite obvious that there is no way that someone would reconstruct the earlier versions of the Gilgamesh Epic from the later, no matter what theory one uses to explain the changes that can be observed; the differences between the works as a whole are surprising and non-intuitive, follwing no distinct pattern. Similarly, I find source criticism in the Hebrew Bible to be also a “consummately fruitless endeavor” as Charles Halton’s Professor Kaufman put it.

Continue reading “The Return of the Son of Compare and Contrast”

Kevin Wilson at Blue Cord rightly takes me to task for my rhetoric, which, of course, is rhetoric and isn’t intended to be addressed, but is my way of keeping such tediously boring drivel as this interesting for my readers. What can I say? I like English and slinging it about like playing airplane with a kid. I even say, “Whee!” in real life.

Regarding the substance of my off-handed critique of one or more of Biblical Studies sacred cows (heavens, what a fuss!), we will still have to differ. I am completely unconvinced that all the source critical work, even since the 1970s is even fundamentally right-headed, much less of truly permanent value. I don’t mean that to sound unkind, but I think it’s true, and I’ll give some of my reasons below, in no particular order.

Continue reading “Son of Compare and Contrast”

Such a can of worms I’ve opened, at such a busy time for everyone! Chris at Higgaion [defunct blog] brings up some good points concerning my critique of dating “Second Isaiah” to the sixth century. Of course, I am unrepentant, and not so easily turned aside. As I mentioned in my earlier post, it was a superficial treatment of some work I’d been doing on Isaiah, not detailed, and so with only that input, and if that were all I had in my hand, I’d agree with Chris that it’s not likely. But, I think perhaps, as Chris said himself, “Kevin is onto something important here.”

In response to Chris’ points however, I have a few of my own:
1.) What is the basis of the assumption that only the exile of Judahites by Babylonians is the possible context for any texts dealing with exilic subjects? Both Israel and Judah experienced much more massive deportations at the hand of the Assyrians in the late eighth and early seventh centuries, and some of those deportees, as in the case of others from the campaigns in the west, will have certainly ended up in Babylon and other southern Mesopotamian cities. In fact, we know of some who ended up in Elamite border cities. Both Israel and Judah are mentioned throughout Isaiah (claiming that “Israel” really refers to only the remnant of “Judah” is special pleading) in contexts of exiles, reassuring them, and so on. Would a prophet like Isaiah working precisely at the time of the fall of the Northern Kingdom actually have ignored that and the fate of its exiled people? Obviously not, though it is part of, for lack of a better term, academic orthodoxy to treat every reference to an exile to the Babylonian Exile of 586.

Continue reading “On Second Isaiah”

Kevin Wilson at Blue Cord [defunct blog] has raised some interesting and quite valid points regarding my Discoveries and Scholarship post, prompted by and added to by Charles Halton at Awilum [also defunct].

Charles nicely summarizes my point and objects to part of it with this: “One might argue that the re-evaluations have not gone far enough, fair enough. But, we see similar methodology in examining sources of documents in other ANE literature–it’s not like the Old Testament is the only ancient document that undergoes this sort of analysis.” It is definitely true that such examinations are happening now more often, seemingly exactly under the influence of Hallo’s contextual approach. I applaud this and want more of it. The in-depth examination of ancient texts, their language, their structure, and their own literary and historical context is imperative before any comparison can be made with other texts, including the Hebrew Bible. But such very welcome studies are also all very recent. Of course, the Hebrew Bible, with which western culture has been much longer familiar, has had many more such studies done, many of now-questionable value, and much solely of interest to studies on the history of scholarship. From this angle come my objections to certain fundamental elements of academic orthodoxy in Biblical studies, but in particular more widely to a certain mindset of or preference for complication over simplicity.

Continue reading “Compare and Contrast”

No this is not about the discovery of the Ark of the Covenant, Solomon’s Decoder Ring, the Essene Secret Handshake Manual, or the Gospel of That Guy That Sorta Heard Jesus at the One of the Sermons on One of the the Mounts But Was Too Far Away To Understand What He Said And Consequently Got Everything Quite Entirely Wrong But Has A Following Anyway And Is Now Quite Wealthy.

As part of a very interesting project that I began some time ago, I’ve been looking into the publication dates for various ideas related to Biblical Studies, the dates for the decipherment of ancient languages and their writing systems, the dates for the discovery of important ancient texts, and so on. One of the most intriguing things that this investigation continues to reveal is that many ideas taken for granted in Biblical Studies have turned out to be actually anything but critical in origin. Many such, however, had become academic orthodoxy before some very important and relevant discoveries, namely nearly all of them, which should really have called into question a number of these orthodoxies. That, however, never happened.

Continue reading “Discoveries and Scholarship”