A follow-up comment:Secret Alias wrote: ↑Sun Nov 27, 2022 9:16 am. . . There is evidence. I've brought it up during the course of the discussion. Not the same thing as saying PERSUASIVE evidence (where 'persuasive' is ultimately a subjective determination). The evidence is:My point has been that there is no evidence for the Pentateuch having been known in the Persian era.
1. Persian words translated into Hebrew
2. Persian words translated into the Greek translation
3. Persian concepts like pardes, dat
4. Josephus's citation of a presumably Jewish source that Jews and Samaritans practiced levitical laws (calculation of Sabbatical years)
5. the consequences of Samaritan primacy argument (which we are discussing here) namely
(i) a Samaritan text defining Jewish religious life could only have or more likely have been written in an age where northern Israelite culture was at its zenith
(ii) the amount of time necessary for the Qumran fragment to have been produced in a specifically Jewish and specifically isolated setting like Qumran given (a) Joshua being written after Deuteronomy and Deuteronomy after an original Tetrateuch and this Hexateuch to have originated in Samaria and then brought to 'Judaism' and then Qumran specifically c. 250 BCE.
Whether you are persuaded by these arguments they constitute arguments and evidence (where in the case of 5ii a chronological reconstruction is evidentiary).
I have to disagree, sorry. We have each stated our points of view but that's only the first step before a discussion can take place.Secret Alias wrote: ↑Mon Nov 28, 2022 10:28 amYou said THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE for a point of view. I merely restated that there was evidence, you know there's evidence but - for whatever reason - that you have determined it wasn't persuasive. That's an important distinction. You were overstating the situation.Have you read any of the works you cited earlier or any of my responses to that point? You have not addressed them but only return to repeating your original point as if nothing those articles I said or anything I have proposed needs any engagement at all.
We have discussed the evidence.
Maybe it is better if we try not to cover everything in each comment. Can we take just one exhibit at a time?
Can we be specific so we know exactly what we are addressing here? Earlier, we saw a specific response to this point, if I understand and recall correctly:
Is not a Persian loan word or translated Persian word a piece of data that can be explained in many different ways?Russell Gmirkin wrote: ↑Sun Aug 14, 2022 7:52 pm . . . If [Deut 32:2] does contain a Persian loan word, this would be the only Persian loan word in the Pentateuch. (And I personally don't see how a Persian loan word is a problem in a Hellenistic Era text under my dating proposal.) . . . .
You like to use analogies. Here is one of mine: I like watching murder mysteries. The detectives are always being led by "suggestive" associations and possibilities that they are imagining from what they experience and see and hear but they only find clear evidence at the end of the show. Until then, they are looking at lots of data, lots of persons, and trying to imagine all sorts of theories about "who done it". They have lots of data but none of it will stand up as evidence in court to prove their theories -- until they finally at the end discover the true culprit.
Back to the point:
When I use Latin, Greek, Persian, Indonesian, French, Aboriginal words in my writing and speaking, that is only evidence of cultures that came before me and with which my ancestors had close contacts and have influenced my culture today. The borrowed words I use are not evidence that I live in Roman, Greek, etc times.
Contrast what is clear evidence of dating events:
- A coin with a Persian king stamped on it is evidence that the coin was minted in the time of that Persian king.
- A monument with an inscription declaring that its author is the Persian king is evidence that the monument belongs to the time of the Persian king.
- A letter dug up in Egypt addressed to an officials and dating in the year of a Persian king is evidence that the letter was written in the time of the Persian king.
Now it is possible that each of the above is a forgery. But if the tests and studies for authenticity in each case are positive, then they are evidence for those items being produced in the time of a particular Persian king.
But words I use (Latin, Greek, French...) are only evidence of contacts that have happened either in my own day or in previous times.
Perhaps I should respond to one more related point about the discussion in general:
Yes, it would be odd. But scholarship is littered with a long history of ideas that had to be discarded because they lacked evidence and were based on theories alone. The theories lead scholars to interpret data in a certain way that is favourable to their theory. The data is not evidence for the theories. It is merely interpreted as if it supported the theory. People once believed that dinosaur bones were planted by the devil or evidence for some other world that fit the theory of their religious beliefs.Secret Alias wrote: ↑Mon Nov 28, 2022 10:28 am That "there is no evidence" for the Persian period would be odd given that it is a more widely accepted position than your preferred third century BCE theory.
Not at all. Not at all. No no no no no no. People can be misguided and have ideas that later prove to be wrong but they are still acting in good faith, with all sincerity. The Documentary Hypothesis is a reasonable theory. But our reasoning is not always correct. When evidence emerges that contradicts our theories, our reasonable conclusions, then we will usually try very hard at first to defend what we have long believed, but eventually, if the evidence is secure, the ideas will have to be discarded. But we are human. It often takes us longer to discard wrong ideas than to embrace new ones that newly considered evidence points towards.Secret Alias wrote: ↑Mon Nov 28, 2022 10:28 am This state of affairs would imply that all those who espouse the Persian dating are pathologically motivated, maliciously motivated, acting in a way contradictory to good scholars (i.e. for having developed a model without any actual evidence).
Maybe in another comment we can address why historians do not read Josephus as evidence for events centuries before his time.Secret Alias wrote: ↑Mon Nov 28, 2022 10:28 amAs long as we acknowledge that both sides develop their arguments FROM EVIDENCE there is nothing more to say. THERE IS EVIDENCE FOR THE ORIGIN OF THE TETRATEUCH IN THE PERSIAN. Whether or not it is persuasive is an ongoing debate/discussion. The fact that you feel that Persian loanwords, Josephus's testimony and the chronology incorporating a Samaritan text into Judaism aren't persuasive doesn't make it a "non-evidentiary" position.