Endnote 3 – Eyewitness Testimony

Frank M. Cross and David N. Freedman, Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry, Society of Biblical Literatue Dissertation Series (SBLDS) (Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1975); D.A. Robertson, Linguistic Evidence in Dating Early Hebrew Poetry, SBLDS 3 (Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1972), pp. 31–32 and 138. Robertson’s criteria are generally sound, but he mistook b ‘sûr in Judges 5:27 as a preposition + (late) relative, rather than as a proposition + (old) noun meaning, “in the place where.”

Furthermore, -m to indicate the third-person plural (in verses 14, 20, 21) is not an index of age, and may even reflect an original defective orthographic tradition. And in identifying suffix-form verb followed by w + prefix-form verb as a standard later form, Robertson failed to analyze verb function as an index of age. The instance in verse 28, nsûqph wtybb, expresses ongoing action in the past (“she was looking down and wailing”); this is not identical with the later use of the sequence for simple past narration (for example, “she looked down and wailed”).