Old Testament History And Recent Archeology From Solomon To Zedekiah Gleason L. Archer, Jr. The age of Solomon was noteworthy for the development of wisdom literature, at least according to. the biblical record. Until recent times the tendency of liberal scholarship has been to declare spurious virtually all of the works attributed to. Solomon, such as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of So.lomon. As to the period when the Book of Job was written, there is no clear internal evidence, although most conservative scholars believe that it was compo.sed at least as early as the reign of So.lomon, if not several centuries earlier. It is usual fo.r higher critics to look fo.r some definite historical setting for the bo()k to assign it to that period, on the supposition that its strict mo.notheism and concern for the philosophical problems indicated a postexilic or perhaps even post-Alex andrian milieu. This was then a sort of allegory of the suffer ings . of J udah during the Babylonian captivity, with Job representing the whole nation of Israel. From the occurrence of Aramaic terms here and there in the text, it was supposed that only a fifth-century or fourth-century date of c()mposi tion could account for all of these phenomena. This has become virtually official dogma which students in most mod ern theological seminaries must embrace, on the penalty of incurring the label o.f obscurantism stupidity. 0.1' It therefo.re comes as a surprise to discover that even a liberal authority like Marvin Po.pe acknowledges that a new look at the archeo.logical data demands a revision of this postexilic dating. He points outl that the great antiquity of Marvin H Pope, Job in The Anchor Bible, p. xxiv. I 195 196 BIBLIOTHECA SACRA July, 1970 the literary motif of the problem of suffering on the part of a righteous victim of misfortune was treated in Sumerian literature at least as early as 2000 B. C. S. N. Kramerdis cusses this Sumerian poetical essay' and points out that the basic issue is that discussed in the Book of Job. He states further: "Certainly if the work was composed in the exilic or early postexilic period, as many critics believe, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the author to ignore the parallel between the sufferings of the individual and the nation. There is, however, not the slightest suggestion of in terest in the fate of the nation Israel betrayed anywhere in the book as conservative scholars, we might add, have always maintained. The choice of a descendant of Esau as the repre sentative righteous sufferer would rule out any likelihood that the narrator had in mind the nation Israel or Judah.m This is an excellent example of how the argument from history can be turned against the settled conclusions of rationalist modern scholarship, an example all the more impressive be cause it comes from an erstwhile disciple of this school of thought. Like W. F. Albright, Pope emphasizes that: "The patri archal setting of the Prologue-Epilogue appears as authentic . in detail and coloring as that of the patriarchal narratives in Genesis. Job's wealth, like Abraham's, consists of cattle and slaves. There is no priesthood or central shrine, and the patriarch himself offers sacrifice ( Job 1 :5; 12:8). The Sa beans and Chaldeans are represented as nomadic raiders with no hint of their later political or economic importance (Job· 1 :15, 17). The unit of money named in Job 42:11 is met elsewhere only in Genesis 32 :19 and Joshua 24 :32. The prologue-epilogue also presents a number of literary features and motifs which are characteristic of Semitic epic, as known from Akkadian literature, and more recently from Ugaritic texts. These epic literary features appear as a sort of sub stratum which may well derive from a very ancient Job epic.4 That there was an ancient Job legend, and perhaps a Job epic, which served as the basis of the biblical narrative, • s. N. Kramer, Mall and His God, pp. 170-82. 3 P ope, 0 p• 'Ctl. , p. XXI.X . Cf. N. M. Sarna, "Epic Substratum in the Prose of Job," Journal of 4 Biblical Literature, LXXVI (1957) 13-25. O. T. HISTORY FROM SOLOMON TO ZEDEKIAH 197 is suggested by allusion to Job in Ezekiel 14 :14, 20 where he is associated with the ancient worthies, Noah and Daniel." Here Pope understands the reference to Daniel as relating to Dan'el the son of Keret (who, however, was apparently a none too godly polytheist, according to the Ugaritic account). Pope further suggests that since the literary parallels to Job go back to the beginning of the second millennium B. C., it may be that even the dialogue itself is older than commonly supposed. The choice of an Edomite hero would! have been an affront to the nationalistic sentiments of later Judah, for it was the Edomite who in particular rejoiced over the humiliation of Judah and took full advantage of their brothers' discomfort and misfortune, thereby intensify ing still further the enmity which had long smouldered between the two nations. 5 As for the dialogue itself, the ideas cham~ pioned by the three friends of Job were normative in Meso potamian theology from the early second millennium. So the so-called Babylonian Job, or "I will praise the Lord of Wis dom, a dialogue between a sufferer and a comforter-or Ha heckler-is represented in the Babylonian Theodicy com 7 posed between the fourteenth and eighth centuries, most probably around 1000 B. C. Moreover, the use of the divine name Shaddai harks back to the patriarchal era, whether as a genuine reflection of the time of the narrative, or as a studied archaism.8 Before leaving the discussion of recent treatments of Job, mention should be made of A. Guillaume's article in the Leeds University Oriental Society which contains a well reasoned argument for a North Arabian background of the entire Book of Job.9 Early Thamudian inscriptions refer to the land of Uz as located in the neighborhood of Medina and Khaybar in Hej az. The name Job has been found in the vicinity of Tema. Despite the claims of many scholars con cerning the occurrence of Aramaisms in the speeches of Elihu (Job 32-27), there are, according to Guillaume, no demon- Pope, op. cit., p. xxxiv. 5 Ancient Near Eastern Texts, ed. by James B. Pritchal'd, pp. 434-37. 6 Ibid., pp. 438-40. 7 Pope, op. cit., pp. xxxv-xxxvi. ' 8 A. Guillaume, "The Unity of The Book of Job," A1I1Iual of Leeds Uni 9 'Versity Orie1ltal Society, IV (1964), 26-46. 198 BIBLlOTHECA SACRA July, 1970 strable Aramaisms at all in his remarks, and only one doubtful example in all the rest of the book.IO Everyone of the alleged Aramaisms has been found in Arabic, and it is warrantable to hold that, apart from words of non-Semitic 'Origin, only 103 roots in the lexicon of biblical Hebrew lack parallels in Arabic. Of these, hardly one fifth (i. e., about twenty-one) are to be found in preexilic writings and, there- . fore, to be regarded as resulting from an Aramaic sphere of influence truly divergent from the main stream of Arabian speech. Guillaume then proceeds to discuss about twenty-four specific terms usually classed as Aramaic, and he finds them (sometimes by dint of reshuffling consonants and repointing the vowel signs) to be explicable as Arabisms rather than Aramaisms. This approach opens up a whole new line of investigation and is worthy of further study. But it obviously does not militate against a date of composition in the Solo monic period or in the second millennium B. C. The obviously conservative character of Arabic phonology and morphology can only be explained as preserving a very ancient, un doubtedly even the most ancient, form of the Semitic language group, even though the extant written examples of Arabic hardly antedate the first millennium. As to the book of Proverbs, some of the standard higher critics regard Solomon as having contributed at least the earliest form of portions of chapters 10-22, whereas virtually all the rest of the collection comes from the late preexilic or even the postexilic period. More extreme critics like C. H. Toy regarded Proverbs as Hellenistio in period, with no part of it earlier than 350 B. C. The personification of wisdom (hokhmah) in chapters 8-9 was identified with the Greek philosopher's apotheosis of sophia, and therefore a result of Hellenic influence. But such deductions were arrived at with out a careful study of the literature of ancient Egypt, as Kitchen points out.!! He states that his personification of wisdom is precisely the same technique as that employed in Egypt, where it waS common to personify truth (ma'at or IDu'at), justice, intelligence, understanding, and other such Ibid. 10 Kenneth A. Kitchen, Ancient Orient and Old Testament, p. 16. 11 O. T. HISTORY FROM SOLOMON TO ZEDEKIAH 199 abstract concepts. This was known in second-millennium Mesopotamia and among the Hittites and Hurrians as well, and hence it is entirely gratuitous to seek for a precedent in later Greek literature. As for the argument that a longer passage on such a theme demonstrates a later time of com position, this would be quite an astonishing argument to the Egyptian author of the Wisdom of Ptahhotep in 2300 B. C. or to Khety, the son of Duauf ca. 1980 B. C. The fact that R. H. Pfeiffer, Otto EissfeIdt, H. H. Rowley, and even G. W. Ander son in 1959 could show such a complete ignorance of these ancient Near Eastern parallels is very difficult to explain. 12 Can it be said that a selective approach to the available archeological data indicated more of a zeal to sustain the cherished opinion of their preceptors than to arrive at the historical facts?" It is interesting to note that R. B. Y. Scott concedes the possible antiquity of the genre on Canaanite soil, in view of the two proverbs quoted in the Amarna correspondence ema nating from Canaanite kings.H He also indicates that a striking feature of Mesopotamian wisdom writings, and of the Egyptian as well, is the concern with hokhmah on two levels: the first, conservative, practical, or didactic; the second, critical and speculative, sometimes even a bit skepti- . ca! of traditional values and raising more abstract questions in the sphere of ethics and religion. Egyptian examples of the first type include "The Instruction of Ptahhotep," which teaches that wisdom will insure success, and "The Instruction of King Merikare" (from about 2100 B. C.), which teaches that the strength of a king is derived from the love of his subjects and the quality of his nobles, coupled with his own adherence to. justice and integrity. The Egyptian king is responsible to revere the gods, to be faithful in worship, and to remember that an upright character is of decisive importance before the judgment which awaits both rulers and their subjects in the life beyond.15 In Akkadian proverbial literature, we have the "Hymn to Shamash," which expresses unquestioning faith in divine 12 G. W. Anderson, A Critical Introduction to the Old Testament, p. 188. " Kitchen, op. cit.} p. 126, note 56. , R. B. Y. Scott, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in The Anchor Bible, p. xli. 14 15 p ope, op. cl.t ., pp. x Il"l- XI V. 200 BIBLIOTHECA SACRA July, 1970 justice. Shamash is declared to punish evildoers, protect travelers and fugitives, condemn venal judges, and favor the 16 honest merchant and the performer of kind deeds. Also from the early Babylonian period comes the work entitled "Counsels of Wisdom" which teaches: "Reverence begets favor, sacrifice prolongs life, and prayer atones for guilt. Do not covet anything which has been entrusted to you. If you have promised, give. Do not return evil to the man who disputes with you; requite with kindness your evil-doer, maintain justice to your enemy.'J17 After quoting these lines, Scott remarks: "From what has been said above ... it will be evident that the Wisdom movement in Israel was an in dependent part of a much wider and older context in neigh boring cultures. The resemblances .a re both in form and substance. ... In intellectual penetration, ethical awareness, • . and in religious spirit it [the wisdom of Israel] is approached a by these other literatures only here and there. Taken as whole, it is unmatched in the surviving records of the wisdom of any ancient people.>HS It is not even possible to point to the fundamental idea in the Hebrew book of Proverbs that God rules over the entire world rather than over Israel alone and assert, as Mowinckel did in 1955, in his discussion of 19 Psalm 67, that it reflects a relatively late period. Yet, as Kitchen points out,20 this kind of concept was current throughout the Ancient Near East from the third millennium 21 on, as Albright showed. Kitchen then commented: "It is a matter for genuine regret when adherence to long-standing theories prevents scholars from· seeing essential primary 22 facts and realizing their direct implications. So far as Ecclesiastes is concerned, the newer evidence has served to upset completely some of the earlier conclusions based upon the linguistic phenomena. Certain traits of gram mar which were formerly held to be Mishnaic, and therefore extremely late, cannot be so precisely dated as was formerly Ancient Near Eastern Texts, ed. by James B. Pritchard, pp. 387-89. 16 Ibid., pp. 426-27. 17 Scott, op. cit., p. Hi. IS 19 Sigmund Mowinckel, "Psalm Critcism between 1900 and 1935," fTeflts Testament, V (1955), 29. . 2. Kitchen, op. cit., p. 127. 21 WilIiam F. Albright, Stone !lge to Christiallity (1940 edition, cf. pp. 213-17 in 1957 edition). Ibid. 22 O. T. HISTORY FROM SOLOMON TO ZEDEKIAH 201 thought. For example, the Copper Scroll of Qumran Cave 3, dating from the midfirst century A. D. shows the abundant use of the relative particle she, and other associated traits which indicated that the so-called Mishnaic Hebrew was used in ordinary conversation at a much earlier period than formerly supposed. Most instructive is the systematic an alysis of the language of Qoheleth, published by M. J. Dahood.23 This discussion established beyond question that in spelling, vocabulary, and grammar there is a more decisive Phoenician cast to the language of this book than of any other in the Hebrew Scripture. Since this writer has already contributed a fifteen-page study of this phenomenon, it is only necessary to summarize some of the points set forth in detail in that article24 There can be no doubt that the author of Qoheleth assumed the role of King Solomon, whether or not he wrote this work in the tenth century B. C. He mentions his own unrivaled reputa tion from wisdom (1 :16), his financial resources surpassing those of all his contemporaries (2 :8), his large retinue of servants (2 :7), his unlimited opportunities for carnal pleasure (2 :3) and his extensive building activities (2 :4.-6)-all of this on a scale matched by no other known figure of Hebrew history besides Solomon. The internal evidence of the text points to a period before the division of the Hebrew monarchy into the northern and southern kingdoms. But the language of the book is admittedly unique, and quite dissimilar to all other extant pre-Christian Hebrew literature, whether biblical or intertestamental. Franz Delitzsch and E. J. Young quite confidently dated the composition of this work in the· fifth century, but even a superficial comparison with other works from the fifth century (such as Zechariah, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and Malachi) shows a complete and total dissimilarity with the Hebrew of Ecclesiastes. If therefore the book is to be dated in that period, there is no such science as compara tive linguistics, and any book can be dated at any time re gardless of philological considerations. No flimsier case for dating a biblical book has ever been made out by any con- M. J. Dahood, "Canaanite-Phoenician Influence in Qoheleth," Biblica, 23 XXXIII (1952), 30-52. . G. L. Archer, "Linguistic Evidence for the Date of Ecclesiastes," Bulleti71 24 of the Evallgelical Theological Society, XII (1969), 167-81. 202 BIBLIOTHECA SACRA July, 1970 servative or liberal scholar than the case for a fifth-century date of EccIesiastes. But we are not left without guidelines for establishing the time when Qoheleth was composed. Since the language is dissimilar to the rest of Old Testament literature, but shows a pronounced Phoenician cast, the most likely date of author- . ship was at a period when the cultural relations between Israel and Phoenicia were at their closest, and when hokhmah literature was most diligently cultivated. At what other period were these conditions met than during the reign of Solomon, when Phoenician architects and craftsmen were employed in large numbers for the erection of the Temple and the palaces on Mount MOl'iah, and when a close com mercial relationship was maintained with King Hiram of Tyre? Solomon's interests were so wide-ranging that he seems' to have studied the science and literature of all of Israel's· neighbors. It may well have been that he found in the philo sophical essay a genre which had attained classical form in Phoenician literature. As in ancient Greece, the Hellenic authors felt obliged to follow the conventional form established for each genre (Old Ionic for the epic, Doric for the choral poetry, Aeolic for love lyrics, etc.) regardless of their own native dialect, so also the composer of a philosophical essay in the tenth century B. C. may well have felt constrained to use that dialect of Canaanite in which this literary form had attained a classical standard. As Albright has pointed out, the language of epic poetry in Ugarit showed noteworthy differences from the language used in ordinary business documents and in correspondence. Definite stylistic conventions, traits of gram mar, and turns of expression are observable in the various genres of Egyptian literature as well. Although no other examples of the philosophical essay have survived in the Canaanite language area besides Ecclesiastes, it is a fair inference that a previously set literary convention was re sponsible for the strong Phoenician influence observed in this work. A brief summary of the specific data will suffice for our present purposes. In the first place, the spelling shows a distinct Phoenicizing tendency. Thus by several examples O. T. HISTORY FROM SOLOMON TO ZEDEKIAH 203 Dahood shows that the variations between the Massoretic Text and the Septuagint in the use of kayak or kayil are most easily explained on the supposition that the original text read simply h-y (cf. 1 :16; 2 :7); similarly a variation be tween yippeli.i ("they fall") and yippol ("he falls") points to an original spelling y-p-l, which Phoenician would use in vvriting either form. The implications of this complete avoidance of vowel letters are far-reaching as to date. Terminal vowel letters already appear in the Hebrew Siloam Inscription, contemporary with Isaiah in the eighth century. While it may be that later Hebrew scribes wrote in vowel letters in subsequent centuries of copying, it is utterly in conceivable that they could have purposely left them out when their VOTlage already contained them. No example of such omission has ever been found in any Hebrew biblical ma.nuscripts, and no psychological or logical basis can be suggested for such a procedure. Since terminal vowel letters are demonstrable in Hebrew orthography from the eighth century on, there is no possibility whatever that Ecclesiastes could have been composed subsequent to the age of Isaiah. The frequent relative pronoun she, which has often been advanced as an evidence of late origin, turns out to be equally reconcilable with a Phoenicizing style, since is the normal '-8 relative in Phoenician, rather than the classical Hebrew 'asher. The sporadic omission of the definite article 00- observable in Qoheleth also finds its counterpart in Phoenician, as witness the omission of h- before the attributive demonstrative in such expressions as "this citadel" (h-q-r-t z--Karatepe Ill: 14 :15) and "this slaughtering place" (h-m-t-b-hz) (Corpu8 InscripUunum Semitica1'um 3 :4) As Zellig Harris remarks: "Phoenician has the same article h- as in Hebrew, but uses it much more rarely. Its use, though sparing in the Iahmilk in scription from Byblos . . . shows that it was at all events known to early Phoenician. It occurs more frequently in later inscriptions, particularly in those from Sidon. Its use is quite irregular; it was palpably not a basic feature of the lan guage.m (This handily disposes of the argument used by • late-daters of QoheZeth on the ground that Mishnaic Hebrew often omits the article before the demonstrative in such cases; ZeIlig Harris, Grammar of P/toenician, pp. 55-56. 25 204 BIBLIOTHECA SACRA July, t9ro Mishnaic simply exhibited a trait already known in Phoenician a thousand years earlier.) In the area of syntactical peculiarity, Dahood points out that the infinitive absolute is accompanied by the independent pronoun in four or five instances in Ecclesiastes (4:2; 4 :17 ; 8 :9; 9 :11, and possibly 9 :15). Then in 4:2 the sentiment "and I praised" is expressed, w·sabbeah, 'ant (with the inf. absol.). From the letters written by the king of Byblos in the Amarna correspondence and the construction qtl/yqtl 'nk in the Karatepe inscriptions, it is clear that this was a trait of Phoenician syntax. Dahood comments: "This penchant for the infinitive absolute may be ascribed to Phenician syntacti cal influence rather than to mere 'lateness' of the language, because none of the other late books of the Bible evinces such a marked tendency/>26 Phoenician practice also accounts for" the fairly frequent use of the independent personal pronoun as a copular verb, a trait which is usually labeled as late Hebrew. Yet this same usage is observable in the Yehawmilk inscription (k-m-l-k a-d-q h-, -with h-, being equivalent to hu' in Heb.), Corpus Insc1'iptiunum Semitica1'um, 93 :1-2; and also in Lidzberski 36:4 (where h-m-t is used like the Heb. hemmah) and even in the Sardinian inscription found at N ora (a-h-, b-s-r-d-n, "which is in Sardinia"). Time will not permit a discussion of the many borrow ings from Phoenician lexicography, or such key phrases as tahat hassemes ("under the sun"), which in all other North west Semitic literature thus far discovered occurs elsewhere only in Phoenician inscriptions of Tabnit and Eshmunazar of Sidon. Even such an Aramaic term as 1'e'ut, "striving, desire," occurs also in Phoenician documents, and Harris suggested that it may have been a loan-word from Aramaic. 21 As for the term kisTon ("skill, success, profit"), Kautzsch's supposition that it was a borrowing from Aramaic is proved totally false by the discovery of the root k-th-r in Ugaritic (especially as the name of a deity); while k-th-r would be come k-s-r in Canaanite (Phoenician and Hebrew), it would have to appear in Aramaic as k-t-r. The feminine demostra., tive z6h, which occurs six times in Ecclesiastes instead of the normal Hebrew z6,t ("this"), turns out to be the normal Dahood, Biblica, XXXIII, 50. 26 Harris, op. cit., p. 147. 27