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Defusing Pseudo-Scholarship

Philology Recapitulates Paleography

By Avi Hurvitz

I am not surprised that some of the leading paleographical authorities in our field have so severely criticized the effort of Rogerson and Davies to place the Siloam Inscription in the Hasmonean period. Their philological handling of the Biblical and extra-Biblical data is equally unsatisfactory.

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Endnotes

1.

Cf. Elisha Qimron, The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986).

2.

J.C.L. Gibson, A Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions, vol. 1: Hebrew and Moabite Inscriptions (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1971), p. 22.

3.

Over a century ago, the prominent Semitist J. Barth in Nominalbildung (Leipzig: Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1894), p. 276, n. 2, noted that the first letter of the word te‘alah (hl[t) should not be treated as a prefixed morpheme, since it is radical; the root of te‘alah (hl[t) is therefore T‘L (l[t), not ‘LH (hl[). A reference to Barth is readily available in E. Ben Iehuda’s Thesaurus, XVI (New York/London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1959), p. 7835b, n. 1.

4.

See Barth, p. 7835b, n. 1.

5.

Cf. 2 Kings 2:21; Psalms 107:33; Isaiah 58:11.

6.

See, for example, 2 Samuel 15:37.

7.

In other words, nouns like ‘BD and R‘ belong morphologically to two separate nominal classes; therefore, they should not be indiscriminately treated, as done by Rogerson and Davies.