Wed Feb 12 15:23:41 1997

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Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 15:23:40 -0500 (EST)
From: "James R. Adair" 
To: tc-list@shemesh.scholar.emory.edu
Subject: Re: Equidistant letters
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On Wed, 12 Feb 1997, Moshe Shulman wrote:

> Most Biblical scholars will discount it [ELS] immediatly on the
> assumption that it does [disprove the Documentary Hypothesis] (and hence
> must be quackery). However the facts are
> the opposite. If the results would disprove DH, then the believers in DH would
> be relegated to a classification similar to the flat earth society.
> 
> As far as I know there has yet to be any analysis as to whether these results
> would span through sections the DH assigns to P and J or any other divisions.
> Should such a result exist, then we would have to look upon it much as we look
> on Carbon 14 dating of manuscripts and other scientific data. Scientific data
> represents facts, theories must conform to the facts, facts are not rejected
> because they do not conform to theory.

I don't see how any result from ELS could either prove or disprove the DH. 
The ease with which matres lectiones can be inserted into or deleted from
words would rather indicate that any scribe could artifically manipulate
the Hebrew text to generate interesting (i.e., hidden, esoteric) results,
accessible only to those "in the know."  However, it seems almost certain
that, if such a thing did happen, it would have to have been _after the
widespread use of matres lectiones in medial positions developed_ (i.e.,
after the fourth/third century B.C.E.? [my dates may be wrong here])! 
Thus, arguments for or against the DH are completely unaffected by ELS. 

The aspect of this discussion that focuses on whether hidden meanings are
present in the MT (whichever variant form of it) reminds me of a person I
knew who tried to convince me that Mikhael Gorbachev was the anti-Christ
because the letters of his name added up to 666.  Of course, that was only
true if you used a rather idiosyncratic conversion from the Cyrillic
alphabet to the Roman.  In other words, if a hidden message is present in
the text, it may be there because someone (either the reader or some
previous copyist) wants it to be.

Jimmy Adair
Manager of Information Technology Services, Scholars Press
    and
Managing Editor of TELA, the Scholars Press World Wide Web Site
---------------> http://scholar.cc.emory.edu <-----------------

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