Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Idan Dershowitz and Na'ama Pat-El have responded to Benjamin Suchard's paper:
https://www.academia.edu/47094146/Respo ... bal_system_

B. Suchard has given some preliminary rebuttal to the rebuttal, pending a longer publication.
https://twitter.com/bnuyaminim/status/1 ... 3117081600

And Suchard clarified in comments at "academia.edu" (should de facto be dot com?) that he asserts that he has shown that "V" is not proto- or pre- Deut. but that his evidence for a 19th-century forgery is relatively less strong.

So far, fwiw, though others may know better, I find Suchard's case the stronger one.

"Academia.edu is not a university or institution for higher learning and so under current standards it would not qualify for the '.edu' top-level domain. However, the domain name 'Academia.edu' was registered in 1999, before the regulations required .edu domain names to be held solely by accredited post-secondary institutions."

Whatever may or may not have been hypothetically possible in pre-exilic Hebrew, when dealing with antiquities, genuine and faked, Moses W. Shapira could be called an unreliable narrator, when not a mere liar. The genuine Yemeni mss he obtained, he reportedly got unethically. Forgers often feign not fully to understand the item they present to an expert, to let the expert “discover” its importance; the purple pages could have been a sales prop. The “Moabite” pottery was not only fake but excessively numerous. If having a paleo “Moses scroll” might be striking--why not two copies? Shapira stated he bought the strips for a pittance. Why rely on that claim to suppose there was no forgery by the seller? Shapira invented. He could have, by himself or with an accomplice, paid nothing for the strips which, he as salesman pointed out, had high quality ink.