In what might be termed the normal use of text in historical linguistics, linguists use texts of whose dates they are reasonably certain as a source of data on linguistic change. It is far less common for historical linguists to try to use linguistic differences between (sets of) texts whose dates are unknown (or, at best, when only the approximate date of one (set) is known) to date those texts relative to one another.
Yet it is just this second, abnormal use of textual data that has fueled a debate amongst biblical scholars, particular over the last twenty-five years or so, concerning the relative dating of parts of the Biblical Hebrew corpus. This paper is an attempt to introduce this debate to a wider historical linguistic audience. It assumes no familiarity with the debate itself, or with any but the most general properties of the Biblical Hebrew corpus on which it focus.
The structure of the paper is as follows. First, some background to the debate is provided. The general form of the text dating argument is presented as analogous to the more familiar apparent time logic used in investigation linguistic change in progress. Some discussion then follows of the constraints imposed on applying this logic to texts in a literary standard language, with particular reference to Biblical Hebrew. The structure of the Biblical Hebrew corpus is sketched, and alternative views of its historical developed outlined. The dating debate itself follows from a broader debate between the so-called 'maximimalist' and 'minimalist' biblical scholars. For those texts not demonstrably Persian or Hellenistic on non-linguistic evidence, the former argue for exilic or pre-exilic (Iron Age) dating, and the latter for Persian or Hellenistic.
The linguistic aspect of the debate concerns the identifiability of a distinct Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH) in those texts known to be post-exilic. Examples are given of differences between LBH and the Standard Biblical Hebrew of the rest of the biblical corpus. The most persuasive arguments that those differences represent linguistic change are found in a series of papers and monographs by Prof. Avi Hurvitz. A final section of the paper assesses the form of his arguments. I conclude that Hurvitz' arguments are flawed and therefore make no convincing case for the use of linguistic evidence for text dating, at least for the Hebrew Bible.