2025-08-02

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 5

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by Neil Godfrey

By the way, I have informed Stephen Goranson that he is welcome to respond here to my resposting of his criticisms of Russell Gmirkin — despite my earlier prohibition on his posts to this blog. For this series alone I have lifted my relegation of SG’s comments to spam.

In Part 4 I pointed to discussions that answered a list of criticisms against the case that the Hebrew Bible was composed prior to Hellenistic times. Those discussions were mostly from other blog posts of mine but they covered what had been repeated at various times in the earlywritings forum. For anyone interested in the details and context of Stephen Goranson’s ongoing discussion of my responses to his list of data points (that he presented as “evidence” of pre-Hellenistic biblical writings) see the copy of the page at the end of this post.

What follows here is the second part to my attempt to justify the plausibility (even greater explanatory power) of the Hellenistic provenance of all (though Russell Gmirkin would, I think, have said only “most”) the books of the Old Testaments. In my opening post (Part 1) I addressed the circularity underpinning the dominant current view of the Documentary Hypothesis. This time I branched out into the data that is better explained by the Hellenistic era thesis.

I included this in my discussion on the earlywritings forum — again, see the link below for the context.

Why the Hellenistic era …. Part 2

There is more to the Hellenistic provenance thesis than the simple fact of the circularity of the methods of dating the OT books by the past conventional scholarship — something that so far not even SG has denied. Given that SG’s reference to Langlois (when read in full) also allows at least for the possibility of a Hellenistic provenance, we have room to continue.

Archaeology reveals

1. The archaeological evidence of pre-Hellenistic Judea-Samaria has demonstrated that major moments of biblical history are fictions. The “invasion” of Canaan by an “Israelite” ethnic group never happened. The most that can be said about the “Kingdom” of David and Solomon is that it was little more than a village incapable of extending dominance over any area of note. (Jamieson-Drake saw evidence of development from a “lower-order society” to a “chiefdom” in Jerusalem, which falls far from the level of “a state”.)

Why write fiction?

2. The question must arise, then, why such stories were told? Were the stories derived from historical memories? Archaeology has suggested that is unlikely. A fundamental and inescapable fact of any literature is that it must reflect the ideas and beliefs and understandings that are part of its cultural matrix. One specific ideological feature of the narrative of David is that it shares manners, customs, assumptions that we find in the Persian kingdom. One might therefore wonder if the stories were told as part of ideological hopes for an imminent greatness, or at least as an attempt to identify with other great powers, whether of the past and/or present.

But what kind of fiction?

3. The literary structure and style of the Primary History (Genesis-2 Kings), as other scholars (not those arguing for a Hellenistic origin, by the way) have shown, is comparable to the Histories of Herodotus. The closest genre to the Primary History is found in the Greek world. Another comparable genre is the autobiographical narrative. Some scholars have attempted to explain this observation by speculating that Greek works were well known to the subjects of the Persian empire or that even the biblical books were known to the Greeks and influenced the Greeks. One needs to look for the explanation that raises fewest difficulties or questions.

Nothing uniform — why?

4. There are vastly different styles among the biblical books. One can explain this fact by positing a long period of evolution and various cultural influences over centuries. One can also explain the same fact by positing contemporary regional differences. As one scholar noted, imagine if all we had about Socrates were the writings of Plato and Xenophon. Would we have to assume that there was a vast time gap between the two accounts since they are so at odds in so many ways?

What kind of society?

5. One ought also to look at the kind of socio-cultural-economic society that would be required to produce the biblical literature. Here again the archaeological evidence can be interpreted in favour of the Hellenistic period. But this is a vast topic of its own.

The argument emerges from other hypotheses

The scholars I have had in mind while setting out the above points have, with one exception, not been advocates of the Hellenistic origin of the biblical literature. The archaeological evidence that discounts the historicity of “biblical history”, the comparisons with Greek literature and Persian royal ideologies, — all of these are found in works of scholars who never entertained a Hellenistic time setting, as far as I am aware. Philip Davies himself (with whom I began in the OP) always argued for the Persian era for the Primary History and Prophets.

But there are also problems with a Persian era setting that disappear if we move the compositions of the books to the third century.

by neilgodfrey » Tue Feb 20, 2024 11:24 am

In the next post I will set out my personal reason for strongly suspecting a Hellenistic origin of the biblical literature.


The original forum exchange:

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2025-08-01

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 4

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Stephen Goranson has been a regular critic of Russell Gmirkin. Stephen posted the following points (in the earlywritings forum) that he claimed gave reasonable grounds for dating the entire Hebrew Bible (he referred to the “TaNaK“) before Hellenistic era:

There are reasons to consider some TaNaK texts to be older than third century, some of which have been discussed here.

  • Qumran texts, safely considered to be copies rather than autographs, show developments over time. And some may themselves may be older; at least, so Michael Langlois (name searchable here) has argued concerning some paleo-Hebrew mss. Few have been radiocarbon dated (more to be published). Statistically it is unlikely that the oldest one has yet been tested and published.
  • Deir ‘Alla inscription.
  • Silver amulets.
  • It is not plausible that temple priests, before third century, were illiterate and had nothing to read.
  • Semitic language history. A recent–Feb. 14, 2024–observation, for example: “A marginal linguistic difference between the Pentateuch and the rest of the Hebrew Bible” by Benjamin Suchard https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/02/14/a-marginal-linguistic-difference-between-the-pentateuch-and-the-rest-of-the-hebrew-bible/ 

by StephenGoranson » Tue Feb 20, 2024 5:11 am

As Stephen Goranson noted, several of those points had been discussed previously on that forum so one might have expected him to have addressed what had already been presented as responses to his claims that they pointed to a pre-Hellenistic date for the Jewish Bible. I posted my response to Stephen’s reference to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Michael Langlois’ argument in an earlier Vridar post:

Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Invalidate a Hellenistic Origin of the Hebrew Books of the Bible?

As for the Deir ‘Alla inscription, I posted my own observation about how it could well be interpreted as confirmation of Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic era thesis. See

When Yahweh was at Peace with Other Gods — [Biblical Creation Accounts/Plato’s Timaeus-Critias – 7e]

On the silver amulets, see my discussion at

Before “Biblical Israel” there was Yahweh

Stephen’s next point — implying the Hellenistic era hypothesis was declaring that priests “were illiterate and had nothing to read” — is just silly.

As for the difference between the Hebrew of the Pentateuch and other parts of the Bible, we cannot assume that the only explanation for the difference must be a long period of development, and I am sure Stephen knows this. Recently I translated a French work by a couple of renowned biblical and archaeological scholars that included this section:

Linguistic Evidence?

Can the question of the date of the texts of the Pentateuch, or of other biblical texts, be resolved by distinguishing between Classical Biblical Hebrew and Late Biblical Hebrew—a distinction that would offer certain seemingly objective criteria for dating biblical texts? It is not surprising that this method has gained a significant number of adherents, particularly in North America and Israel; we will not go into detail here.19 Let us simply highlight a few precautions to observe in using this method. First of all, we must ask, with E. Ullendorf and E. A. Knauf, whether Biblical Hebrew was truly a spoken language.20 The evidence for the existence of so-called Classical Hebrew21 outside the Bible is limited to a few inscriptions and personal names, which do not allow us to affirm that there existed a unified “Classical Hebrew” during the monarchical period. We must allow for dialectal variation in extrabiblical written and oral texts and, more importantly, for differences between literary language and vernacular language. Furthermore, there is no doubt that certain late texts like Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) differ from what is called Classical Biblical Hebrew. But texts that may well be as late as Ecclesiastes can also be written in perfectly “Classical” Hebrew, as is the case with Zechariah 1–8 and the extracanonical Psalm 151.22

Finally, it is also very difficult—if not impossible—to draw a clear dividing line between “Classical” and “Late” Biblical Hebrew. As C. Edenburg recently observed, biblical texts that all scholars agree are late (from the Persian period) share with Iron Age Hebrew/Moabite inscriptions a preference for direct object suffixes attached to verbs.23 This means that we cannot assert a linear development.24 “Biblical Hebrew” is, above all, a literary language, whose lifespan would have extended beyond the spoken stage (if such a stage ever existed), and which endured in the scribal milieu. The distinction between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew—especially when applied to an entire book—fails to take into account the widely recognized fact that every biblical text is the product of a long process of composition and revision. It thus appears that the scribes were capable of preserving or even partly inventing a language that had not been spoken for many centuries. We must therefore be cautious when claiming that the entire Pentateuch was composed before the Exile simply because it is mostly written in Classical Biblical Hebrew.25

[19] C. EDENBURG, Dismembering the Whole: Composition and Purpose of Judges 19–21, Atlanta, SBL, 2016, 115–123.

[20] E. ULLENDORF, Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1977, 3–17 ; E. A. KNAUF, « War Biblisch-Hebräisch eine Sprache? », in K. SCHMID et al. (éd.), Data and Debates, Münster, Ugarit-Verlag, 2013, 411–423 (421): « l’hébreu biblique n’a jamais été une langue parlée. »

[21] KNAUF, « War Biblisch-Hebräisch eine Sprache ? » remet même en question la plausibilité d’un tel concept.

[22] I. YOUNG, « What Is “Late Biblical Hebrew” ? », in E. BEN ZVI et al. (éd.), A Palimpsest: Rhetoric, Ideology, Stylistics, and Language Relating to Persian Israel, Piscataway, Gorgias Press, 2009, 253–268 (258–259).

[23] EDENBURG, Dismembering, 120–121.

[24] Voir I. YOUNG, « What Do We Actually Know about Ancient Hebrew », Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 27 (2013), 11–31, qui remet en question ladite théorie des trois étapes (hébreu classique, hébreu tardif et hébreu mishnaïque), voir également des appréciations différentes du livre de Job par A. HURVITZ, « The Date of the Prose Tale of Job Linguistically Reconsidered », Harvard Theological Review 67 (1974), 17–34, et par I. YOUNG, « Is the Prose Tale of Job in Late Biblical Hebrew ? », Vetus Testamentum 59 (2009), 606–629.

[25] M. EHRENSVÄRD, « Once Again: The Problem of Dating Biblical Hebrew », Scandinavian Journal of Old Testament 11 (1997), 29–40.

(Translation of a section written by Thomas Römer)

— Finkelstein, Israel, and Thomas Romer. 2019. Aux Origines de La Torah: Nouvelles Rencontres, Nouvelles Perspectives, Paris. 2019. (My electronic copy that does not include page numbers.)


The original discussion in context:

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