Page 251 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

THE OLD TESTAMENT AND ITS CORRUPTION 231

Century B.C.
III Chronicles, Ecclesiastes.
II Book of Psalms completed (largely out of much earlier
poems). Ecclesiasticus, Daniel, etc.
I Book of Wisdom, etc.

The collection and codification of Israel's ancient laws resulted in the
so-called Pentateuch, or the Five Books of Moses (covering Genesis to
Deuteronomy); according to C.H. Dodd these received their final shape
around the fourth century B.C.E. The works of the prophets were also
edited, with historical records often altered in the interest of bringing
them into line with the prophet's teachings."

A. BIBUCAL SOURCES EDITED IN THE FIFTH TO SECOND CENTURY B.C.E.
William G. Dever, Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthro-
pology at the University of Arizona, presents another view.He states that
the Biblical sources were edited in the late Persian (fifth-fourth centuries
B.C.E.) and Hellenistic (third-second centuries B.C.E.) eras. And there are
others such as Tom Thompson of Copenhagen, his colleague Niels Peter
Lemche, Philip Davies of Sheffield, "and a number of other scholars,
both American and European, who believe that the Hebrew Bible was
not only edited in the Persian/Hellenistic periods but was written then." 15
Meanwhile Professor Frederick Cryer of Copenhagen,

concludes that the Hebrew Bible "cannot be shown to have achieved
its present contents prior to the Hellenistic period." The people we
call Israel did not use that term for themselves, he says, before the
fourth century B.C.E. The Saul and David narratives, for example,
were written under "the probable influence" of Hellenistic literature
about Alexander the Great. That these Biblical texts were composed
so late "necessarily forces us to lower our estimation of the work as an
historical source." 16

Niels Lemche has gone even further, tracing the creation of ancient
Israel to "19th-century German historiography that sawall civilizations in

14 C.H. Dodd, TheBible To-day, pp. 59-60.
15 H. Shanks, "Is This Man a Biblical Archaeologist?", Biblical Archaeology Review,
July/August 1996, vol. 22, no. 4, p. 35.
16 H. Shanks, "New Orleans Gumbo: Plenty of Spice at Annual Meeting", Biblical
Archaeology Review, March/April 1997, vol. 23, no. 2, p. 58.