Dear Ken,
I look forward to your posts and to a cordial discussion of the Hebrew verbal system and Semitic linguistics. I would like to read your dissertation. How can I get it? A few years ago, a Norwegian professor made a study of which projects were accepted for doctoral studies at the University of Oslo. He discovered the with very few exceptions only projects whose working hypotheses were in accord with the view of the professors were accepted. Those that presented novel ideas were rejected. I for one find it profitable, and scientifically necessary, to challenge the traditional viewpoints of our time. I see the same problems in different disciplines as I have seen in Hebrew: counterexamples to the traditional views are explained away ad hoc or ignored, and no one has tried to collect all the counterexamples and study them in their own right. For many years I have studied the chronological data in the Tanakh. One problem is that the Neo-Babylonian and the Neo-Assyrian chronologies do not accord with the chronology presented in the Tanakh, and the Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian chronologies are believed to be watertight. I wanted to challenge and test this, and I collated important astronomical cuneiform tablets at the Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin and at British Museum in London and looked at the dates of more than 30.000 cuneiform business documents— as expected, I found that the map did not fit the terrain. As for the Neo-Assyrian chronology, no astronomical tablets can be used for dating, and there are more than 40 eponyms too many to fit the traditional chronology. I found that this chronology hinges on one single datum, namely that the solar eclipse that is said to have happened in the eponymate of Bur Sagale is the eclipse of 15 June 763 BCE. However, this is gusswork, because there are at least eight other solar eclipses that can fit the mentioned eponymate. Regarding the Neo-Babylonian chronology, I found that the lunar positions of the astronomical diary VAT 4956, the backbone of the chronology, fit better the year 588/87 than the year 568/67 (the year fitting the traditional chronology). Moreover, I found about 90 business tablets that contradict the traditional Neo-Babylonian chronology. My conclusion is that the evidence suggest that the traditional chronology is wrong and that both the Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian reigns of kings must be expanded by twenty years. I have also found that many adjustments are necessary for the Persian (Achamenid) chronology. The data have been published in two books of between 400 and 500 pages each. The reason why I have reached these novel chronological viewpoints, is that I have collected and studied contradictory data that no other scholar has collected and studied. Also, that I have carefully studied each cuneiform sign on the most important astronomical tablets, and I have found some errors in the published readings and a lot of c conjectures that the readers are not aware of. Thus, a great part of the astronomical evidence can be questioned. I mention this, because I see the unhealthy situation at many universities, where progress sometimes, or rather often, is curtailed, because of the traditional thinking and because of the excersize of authority, or as the Germans call it Systemzwang. My message is that there is so much traditional viewpoints out there that do not stand a close scrutiny. Therefore, we should not be afraid of new ideas, even if they are far away from the traditional ones. But we should carefully study these new ideas in order to see if they stand a close scrutiny. Best regards Rolf Furuli Stavern Norway Torsdag 30. Mai 2013 11:43 CEST skrev Ken Penner <[email protected]>: > Rolf, you were kind enough to send me a copy of your dissertation in 2005, > and I read over several times in 2005-2006. Thank you. Have you read mine? > I recognize that my previous post was not constructive; I mainly pointed out > problems without suggesting possible resolutions. I hope to remedy that by a > series of posts as I have time over the next month. > > Cheers, > Ken > > Ken M. Penner, Ph.D. > Associate Professor, Religious Studies > 2329 Notre Dame Avenue, 409 Nicholson Tower > St. Francis Xavier University > Antigonish, NS B2G 2W5 > Canada > (902)867-2265 > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
