Dating Archaic Biblical Hebrew Poetry: A Critique of the Linguistic Arguments

For over sixty years, researchers including Albright, Cross, Freedman and Robertson have been pursuing a methodology for identifying a corpus of "Archaic Biblical Hebrew" poetry using a handful of linguistic forms in common with second millennium BCE Ugaritic and Amarna Canaanite. The dating of the poems under consideration has been an outcome of this research. On this basis, Exodus 15.1 18, "Moses' Song of the Sea", is frequently claimed to be the oldest poem, possibly dating to the second millennium BCE.

A critical analysis of the arguments and the underlying hypotheses used to support the use of linguistic data to date this particular corpus of biblical texts is overdue. The author proposes that linguistic data provides neither sufficient nor reliable evidence for dating purposes. The comparison of the second millennium sources with Archaic Biblical Hebrew poetic texts indicates that this Hebrew poetry is typologically more representative of first millennium sources. This does not imply that an individual poem cannot be of second millennium provenance. What it does show is that linguistic evidence is an inappropriate tool for dating these poems.