ANCIENT HEBREW WITHOUT AUTHORS

Abstract

Current scholarship on the history of the Hebrew Bible text sees the composition of biblical literature as a long, drawn-out scribal process of rewriting, to which many individuals contributed. This approach is in harmony with the evidence for variability in the scribal transmission of distinctive (less common) linguistic features in non-MT biblical manuscripts and parallel passages in the MT. The Text-Critical paradigm contrasts with the MT-Only paradigm which presupposes the composition of biblical books or identifiable parts of them by single authors at specific dates. This article focuses on the unusually well-attested text MT 2 Kings 25:1–12// LXX 2 Kings 25:1–12// MT Jeremiah 39:1–10// LXX Jeremiah 39:1–10// MT Jeremiah 52:4–16// LXX Jeremiah 52:4–16 where it is discovered that not a single distinctive linguistic feature is shared by all texts. It concludes with suggestions as to how the application of this approach can help reformulate some of the questions scholars ask in their study of ancient Hebrew.

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