Posts
1. My Mom has started a blog: see here. People on my blogger blog probably know Janice from her insightful comments. Now, you can read more of her insights on her own blog. Take a look!
2. Today, I read Avi Hurvitz’s 1974 article in Revue Biblique, “The Evidence of Language in Dating the Priestly Code.” Hurvitz argues that P does not use later biblical Hebrew, of the sort that we find in the exilic Book of Ezekiel; the post-exilic books of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah; and rabbinic literature. Even when P discusses the same topics as books from Israel’s exilic and post-exilic periods (i.e., the cult), P does not use the terminology that is popular in later books. Consequently, Hurvitz concludes that P is pre-exilic.
Maybe P was archaicizing, meaning he was a post-exilic figure, writing in older Hebrew. Hurvitz doesn’t think so. Hurvitz doesn’t believe that P would archaicize, for P was writing a technical manual for the priesthood. According to Hurvitz, P wanted priests to follow the correct procedures exactly. After all, this was a matter of life and death for them and the nation! So why would P write a manual that had obsolete terms, which would not be readily understandable to his readers? For Hurvitz, archaism is understandable when it comes to poetry, but not for a priestly manual.
But suppose that P did not intend for his document to be applied to the real world, but was merely writing a utopian book about how things would work in an ideal world? (I think here of some things Jacob Neusner says about the Mishnah.) Hutvitz still finds it odd that P contains no later Hebrew terminology. Even an author who was archaicizing would slip, Hurvitz maintains. After all, the Dead Sea Scrolls that archaicize contain some later elements. But P does not, and so Hurvitz concludes that P is pre-exilic.
Hurvitz also does not believe that P was a post-exilic figure ostracized from the post-exilic mainstream, which is an argument some may have given for how P can be post-exilic and yet be untouched by post-exilic Hebrew. Hurvitz notes that even those who believe that P was exilic or post-exilic don’t think that he was some hermit, isolated from the mainstream. After all, Ezekiel and other books contain similarities to P. Some try to date P as post-exilic because it shares elements with post-exilic literature. I’m not sure what Hurvitz has in mind here, for his argument is that P doesn’t use popular post-exilic terminology. And, as my faithful readers know, Hurvitz wrote a book saying that Ezekiel drew from P, not the other way around.
