Towards an Integrated Methodology of Dating the Book of Jeremiah
Anonymous, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam online catalogue, as Jeremia treurend over de verwoesting van Jeruzalem
Project
International scholarship on the Hebrew Bible shares the unanimous consensus that its books, including the Book of Jeremiah, are literary products of the first millennium BCE. Nearly all else is in dispute, for there are no textual witnesses to the Hebrew Bible that stem from the biblical period itself, as the discovery of biblical manuscripts from the Dead Sea are all post-biblical.
For 250 years biblical scholarship has struggled to develop adequate methodologies for the dating of biblical texts, resulting in contentious results for four primary reasons:
- A dramatic rise in the discovery and study of external evidence (epigraphic and archaeological) in recent decades has challenged traditional (“biblical”) datings.
- Newer developments in the study of literary growth in the Hebrew Bible have also advocated for taking into account historical linguistics that hitherto have been neglected in the field of compositional analyses of biblical books but suggest quite different results.
- Different existing methodologies (literary, linguistic, historical, archaeological etc.) have not been sufficiently integrated. They continue to create “conflicting evidences” that have not been addressed in a satisfying way – neither methodologically nor in terms of specific historical datings.
- Different academic cultures (e.g. in Europe, Israel, North America) have been entertaining diverse approaches regarding the composition of the Bible. They are, of course, in constant exchange, but biblical studies are still far from finding a consensus approach.
This project develops an integrated methodology for dating biblical texts, using the Book of Jeremiah as a case study; it integrates a significant Digital Humanities (DH) component with regard to linguistic dating, and balances the results from “natural” and “artificial” intelligence.
