Diachronic Study of the Hebrew Bible: A Field in Crisis

What it is about

A short lecture (Copenhagen 2013) on source criticism of the Pentateuch. Starting from a Jerusalem study group that admitted no progress on its questions (what is a source, a redactor, a layer), Berman argues the root problem is the lack of any agreed procedure for knocking out wrong hypotheses: theories are built from the final text alone, with no external control. He proposes a test: take documented cases of textual growth (Chronicles from Samuel–Kings, the Temple Scroll from the Pentateuch, Gilgamesh versions, Tatian's Diatessaron), learn the reworking "algorithm" on one half, and see whether it reconstructs the source of the other half; Kaufman's attempt suggests it cannot. He endorses Carr's findings from such documented cases (supplementation, not interleaved sources; at most two or three layers; additions rarely over a quarter of the base) and linguistic dating checked against inscriptions and Qumran as the two controlled ways forward.

Ideas

• I1. The paper's proposed experiment is a held-out test in Mova's own sense: fit a rule on one half of a known source/derived pair, judge it only on the other half. Any future tool that claims to detect sources or layers in the Torah should be gated this way, with a negative control (shuffled verse assignment) that must fail.
• I2. Otherwise: none for the grammar or the parser; the paper is about method in literary history, not about language.

For Mova

I1 is a principle for any stylometric or source-critical measure that 12. Biblical, Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew compared (the dating debate) might report; it also supports writing there that dating by the received text alone has no external control. No tool change follows.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.7146/hn.v1i1.142929

@inproceedings{berman2014diachronic,
  title = {{Diachronic Study of the Hebrew Bible: A Field in Crisis}},
  author = {Berman, Joshua},
  booktitle = {HIPHIL Novum 1},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.7146/hn.v1i1.142929},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.7146/hn.v1i1.142929}
}

References

4 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Carr, David M. The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. find
2. Kaufman, Steven A. “Temple Scroll and Higher Criticism,” HUCA 53 (1982) 29-52. find
3. Krugman, Paul. “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?,” New York Times Magazine, September 6, 2009. Available at http//www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html. Accessed November 24, 2013. find
4. Robinson, Joan. Economic Philosophy. London: Penguin, 1962. find

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