The Most Consistent Criticism of Gmirkin's Hypothesis

[Secret Alias]

Jim Davila "But the Hebrew language of the Pentateuch doesn't look like it was written in a Greek-speaking environment (Alexandria). I would expect noticeable Greek influence on the Hebrew. There isn't any." BTW Russell notice you live in Portland. If you're a basketball fan I get free tickets to all the NBA games because I've been producing their halftime shows for 20 years. If there's a Trail Blazers game you want tickets for let me know.

[Russell Gmirkin]

Jim Davila "But the Hebrew language of the Pentateuch doesn't look like it was written in a Greek-speaking environment (Alexandria). I would expect noticeable Greek influence on the Hebrew. There isn't any." BTW Russell notice you live in Portland. If you're a basketball fan I get free tickets to all the NBA games because I've been producing their halftime shows for 20 years. If there's a Trail Blazers game you want tickets for let me know.

Jim Davila has used this as his excuse not to read either Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible (despite his noting very positive reviews of this book) and Plato's Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts. He is not familiar with either book firsthand, so his criticism, if you can call it that, is without any merit. This argument was also made by Dever (What Did the Biblical Writers Know?, 275-76), who argued that the lack of Greek loan words in Biblical Hebrew dated these texts (Daniel excluded) to pre-Hellenistic times. The fallacy of this argument is demonstrated by the fact that Qumran Hebrew of the second and first centuries BCE also displays a complete absence of Greek loan words, as noted by Elisha Qimron, The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), 117, except for the intrusive Copper Scroll from Cave 3, which is not thought to be part of the Qumran corpus, and which freely mixes Greek and Hebrew. So while the authors of the Copper Scroll, written in the Hellenistic or Roman periods, uses Greek right and left, the scrolls authors were writing all sorts of scrolls with no Greek influence on the Hebrew at all.

Davila posts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, but he is either ignorant of this feature of Qumran Hebrew or completely failed to consider the implications as relating to my theory of the origins of the Pentateuch. His ignorance is compounded by the fact that I hold the authors of the Torah to be visitors from Judea and Samaria, not from Alexandria. Why would these visitors be speaking an Alexandrian dialect of Hebrew when they lived elsewhere? His comments make no sense.

[StephenGoranson]

Whether or not that criticism is the "most consistent" one, I'll leave aside for now, but it is imo significant.
The hypothetical (or REG-proposed, based in part on questionable editing of Aristeas) author-group in Alexandria are not the same as the Qumran text copying and collecting group. Especially, as further imagined by Gmirkin, if the putative Alexandria visitors were also the first Greek Bible translators.

James R. Davila is more than a blogger. Nothing wrong with blogging; I like some blogs, mostly not Biblically-oriented ones these days, but JRD's paleojudaica blog helps keep him aware of many points of view. Davila wrote his Harvard dissertation on Qumran Genesis and Exodus texts and also contributed to the DJD publications.
Davila is not "ignorant." K. Schmid is not "totally oblivious." Davila and I have not always agreed in the past, but he is a learned scholar. IMO that counts for something, if I may say so on a forum where someone (not REG) may commend without embarrassment a Chick Publication.

I am not opposed to independent scholars--I indeed was one when I published in Revue de Qumran. But being part of a seminar where, on various subjects, one is not the smartest person in the room, can be helpful. Among other things: a check against arrogance.

The 2006 REG book included logical mistakes. I am not the only one who did not eagerly read later books that imagine an even longer list of Greek writers showing Hebrew writers how to write Bible, as if (remember these?) they needed to be given a paint-by-numbers set. Hebrew is not some Johnny come lately compared to Greek

REG asserted that one must read a particular new book to intelligently comment on Elephantine. Does it follow that all earlier comments are not intelligent?

Several fine scholars simply are not persuaded by REG's Alexandria scenario.

[neilgodfrey]

JRD's paleojudaica blog helps keep him aware of many points of view.

No it doesn't. He does not allow comments on his blog so he shuts out critical responses to what he posts. His blog allows him to write but does not allow him or his readers learn of any other point of view.

[Secret Alias]

Sorry. I am trying to be more agreeable. You know how I like analogies.

Right now I am very busy at work. I charge double what I charge when I am not busy.

In the same way academics who are busy act one way and those aren't another. The same point was raised in the more or less favorable review that Gmirkin or someone here drew our attention. There are Persian loanwords and Persian influence but no obvious Greek loanwords or Greek influence on the language. If he sounds gruff. Maybe he's really busy. He didn't sound that different from you or Gmirkin when I brought up the possibility of Samaritan primacy. We're all busy. Busy working on the stuff that matters to us. And when someone comes along with something different we act the same.

It's like the realization I had when playing football (soccer) for the first time in a while. The fight for the ball is really the consequence of limited resources. Pour a hundred balls on to the pitch the environment becomes more relaxed.

[StephenGoranson]

In this thread, how Davila runs his blog (which fwiw does sometimes add comments) is not much concern to me.
Rather, that Gmirkin's Alexandria scenario lacks credible evidence.

[neilgodfrey]

Jim Davila "But the Hebrew language of the Pentateuch doesn't look like it was written in a Greek-speaking environment (Alexandria). I would expect noticeable Greek influence on the Hebrew. There isn't any."

That was the same selected portion of JD's quote that I posted 4 years ago and to which RG responded way back then.

Russell Gmirkin has explained that the authors of the first Hebrew Pentateuch were from "Judea" and writing as "Judeans" so we have no reason to expect an influence of Alexandrian dialect.

There is another factor to be considered, in my view at the moment: that is, that if there were any Greek words in the original Pentateuch, they would almost certainly be erased by soon afterwards by opponents of Hellenism. In RG's argument, we read that authors of Exodus were opposed to the apparent polytheistic hints introduced by the author/s of the earliest chapters of Genesis. Bernard Barc, who would have argued that RG was too conservative and early in his dating of the Pentateuch, proposing instead an even later date, came to discard the idea that the original Hebrew Pentateuch was closer to the Septuagint and concluded that its authors were virulently anti-Hellenistic, at least politically. They sought to create a work that was attributable entirely to their God as revealed to "his people". Obvious Greek influences had to be muted.

The irony is that though Hellenism was the driving force behind the idea of the Pentateuch, the Pentateuch had to be presented as entirely a revelation from God, in particular the Jewish-Samaritan God.

Both Barc and Gmirkin identify distinctive Greek influence in the Pentateuch but at the same time point to explanations why those Greek influences were not overtly pronounced or advertised through references to Greek authors or use of Greek loanwords. Other scholars who have likewise written about demonstrable Greek influence on the Pentateuch while at the same time accepting a pre-Hellenistic era date for it, have suggested that the Greek influences came to "Palestine" through Phoenician traders, and such -- hence pointing to another possible explanation for a text with obvious Greek parallels but without Greek loanwords.

[neilgodfrey]

There are Persian loanwords and Persian influence

Why are we returning to this assertion?

I thought it had been established that there are no Persian loanwords in the Pentateuch. Recall the following comment:

Persian loan words are mainly found in the late texts Song of Songs and Qohelet (Ecclesiastes).

A good article by Ian Young, the celebrated Australian linguist of the Hebrew Bible, incidentally deals with the issue of Persian loan words:

https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/yount357913

One particular quotation stands out:

On the one hand, it is generally considered, as Mats Eskhult has recently put it, that "Persian loanwords...almost unequivocally point to the Persian era" (c. 500–300 BCE). The other side of this argument is also well put by Eskhult: "What deserves to be stressed is that Persian words are not to be found in the Pentateuch at all! If loanwords of Persian origin are considered a strong argument when dating biblical texts, then the lack of every vestige of such loanwords ought to be considered as an important evidence for a date of origin prior to the Persian era."

So basically no Persian loan words in the Pentateuch. [The single Persian word dat = law at Deut. 33.2 (MT) is believed to a textual corruption.]

Personally I find linguistic dating of texts to be junk science. For instance, in the entire corpus of Dead Sea Scrolls (ignoring the Copper Scroll from Cave 11 which appears to be unrelated to the DSS) there is not a single Greek loan word.

[Secret Alias]

Ok. This is what I am not getting. I know one of the most authoritative experts on the Hebrew language in Australia. I know other Hebrew experts. I am also aware of dissenting voices. But there are many who see dat as a Persian loanword. In fact balashon as of 2006 https://www.balashon.com/2006/03/dat.html "Everyone agrees that the word dat comes from a Persian word - data. (In the Book of Ezra the word appears as such - דתא)." Where is the equivalent for Greek in the Pentateuch? At least there is dat. What's an example of a Greek word that is disputed or otherwise in this alleged Hellenistic document?

"As for dat itself, this is certainly a Persian loanword in Hebrew and later became the dominant Jewish word for ..." https://books.google.com/books?id=XJ4np ... AF6BAgHEAI

"Its use here would be an anomaly given that dat is not originally a Hebrew word but was adopted from Persian about the fifth century B.C.E." https://books.google.com/books?id=VC0Ev ... re&f=false

On Persian loanwords at Qumran https://www.jstor.org/stable/43370428

[Leucius Charinus]

There are Persian loanwords and Persian influence

Why are we returning to this assertion?

It's a deflection from the finding that the law codes in the Torah reflect a loan from those found in Plato and a knee-jerk reaction to the data driven finding that there is no unambiguous physical evidence for the cultural acceptance of the Torah law (1) prior to the 3rd century BCE as outlined in Russell Gmirkin's books and (2) prior to the 2nd century BCE as outlined in "The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal", Yonatan Adler, 2022