Vern Robyn Cynthia. The relevance of linguistic evidence to the dating of archaic poetry of the Hebrew bible

University of Sydney, 2008. — 277 p.The continued reliance upon evidence from linguistic data for dating Archaic Biblical Hebrew poetic texts to the second millennium BCE is no longer acceptable as it can be shown that linguistic evidence is a flawed tool for dating purposes. That these archaic poems are older than the remainder of the Hebrew Bible because they have several morphemes and syntactic forms in common with second millennium Ugaritic and Amarna Canaanite is disputed with particular reference to DA. Robertson’s study (1972). There is no compelling morphological or syntactic evidence which indicates that the presence of these archaisms necessarily implies that any text from an Archaic Biblical Hebrew corpus comes from an early period. The basis for the challenge is the proposition that if the assumed antiquity of this poetry is related chronologically to the dating of the language in the Ugaritic and Amarna texts, then certain other morphological forms from these two sources are also expected to be present. Three case studies are presented in support of this argument. The contrast of the presence of an intact case system, the third person masculine t— preformative in the prefix conjugation and the third person feminine ending -t of the suffix conjugation, with an almost complete absence of these features in archaic poetry is a critical indicator of the limitations of the use of linguistic evidence for dating archaic poetry. Linguistic evidence indicates that the poetry of this corpus is typologically more representative of first millennium sources. This does not imply that an individual poem cannot be of second millennium provenance. What it does show is the lack of relevance of linguistic evidence as a tool for the early dating this poetry.