There is another book on the same subject, some of which can be read at http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1570718423/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-2861815-8093602#reader-page

 

Dear Peter Wakefield:

  Since the NT is my speciality, I am very careful to wade into Old Testament issues of documentary provenance and Hebraic linguistic debates, but my two years of Classical Hebrew [1961-3] in graduate school and associated studies enable me to have a modicum of critical evaluation skills.

 Question: What is your material evidence that “the entire Old Testament is a proven forgery created by some Babylonian Jew by the name of Ezra”?

  Now, Ezra and Nehemiah have some passages that are in Aramaic [the parent to Hebrew which is a NW Semitic dialect]; Daniel 2:4b-7:28 is in Aramaic.  I do not believe that any expert scholar has a convincing explanation as to why both are used.   Ezra and Nehemiah do raise difficult problems about ethical issues of intermarriage and mandated divorce for purity reasons.
   But, in terms of linguistic matters and provenance of the documentary evidence, the scholar is shut up to a rather limited corpus of manuscripts dating back to around 800 AD or so, the Massoretic Text, unless we include the Dead Sea Scrolls—a field of study that continues to be in its early stages of development.  Unless one possesses some of the linguistic skills of a William Foxwell Albright [John Hopkins], one must be rather restrained in making dogmatic declarations about authorial sources.   Also, one must be careful to distinguish Talmudic statements about Ezra and Nehemiah and Daniel [all placed in the Fifth Century BC normally] from the narrowly sectarian purposes of the Talmudic rabbinate with their distortions and legalistic bent of mind.

  For the present, I reiterate my QUESTION above since I have a serious interest in the material evidence that “EZRA” composed the Pentateuch and the Historical Books and am open to your argument.

Sincerely,
 --
Robert H. Countess, Ph.D.
Ancient Greek
email: boblbpinc@earthlink.net
28755 Sagewood Circle
Toney, AL 35773  USA
Phone: (256) 232-4940  Cell: (256) 653-7598
Fax:  (256) 232-4940