Q&A: Anachronism in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)
Anachronism in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I know you do not usually spend much time dealing with Bible study, but I would be very grateful if you could help me with a question that has been bothering me.
There is an almost complete consensus among scholars that the biblical word that appears as “pardes” originates in Old Persian.
The claim is based on the fact that in Old Persian the word pairidaeza appears, meaning an enclosed place surrounded by a wall; it is documented in Achaemenid inscriptions, and corresponds almost perfectly in both sound and meaning to the Hebrew word pardes.
However, this word appears in the books of Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs—books which, according to tradition, were written by King Solomon, centuries before the Persian period.
So I wanted to ask:
Doesn’t this fact itself undermine, or even refute, the claim that Solomon himself composed these books?
Answer
I have no idea. I do not understand Old Persian, nor the scholarship that says this is the case. I will only say that my trust in these disciplines is very limited. And I would add that a Persian word could also have come from earlier sources (like the Hebrew Bible, for example).
Discussion on Answer
Thank you for the answer, Rabbi.
I know your trust in these disciplines is low; you tend to mention that fairly often.
Still, from reading many of your articles and writings, I get the impression that you are willing to examine every claim and every piece of evidence on its own merits, even if it contradicts your positions.
If no archaeological, scientific, or linguistic claim can refute or undermine our basic assumptions, then it would seem this is apologetics rather than a rational position (Heaven forbid, I do not say that dismissively, but out of a desire to understand whether there is room to examine our assumptions in cases like these).
In the case at hand, it seems really quite unlikely that the word “pardes” passed from Hebrew into Persian, because its earliest documentation is in Persian inscriptions from the 6th century BCE, and its linguistic structure (pairi = around, daeza = wall) makes natural sense only in Persian, whereas there is no similar root or structure in Hebrew.
According to biblical scholarship, Ecclesiastes was written in the Hellenistic period at the earliest.
In any case, here is an Orthodox video about it:
To the questioner: this is not a difficulty at all, because the Holy Tongue is the source of all languages.
And even if you say that Persian developed later than the Holy Tongue, it still developed from a language that developed from a language that developed from a language that developed from the Holy Tongue. So there is no difficulty whatsoever.
I will only add to what Malachi said that the fact that the video is “Orthodox” does not make its content Orthodox.
@Yossi Cohen Source?
I do not even see any point in giving Yossi Cohen the time of day
What does the Persian period have to do with the Persian language? The Persian language existed long before the Persian period, and even if we assume the word is originally Persian, it could have passed into Hebrew hundreds of years before the Persian period.
The difficulty does not even begin.