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Re: orion Spaceless "BYTYHWH" inscription
Dear Niels Peter, who wrote:
>Date of inscription, please!
Whoops, sorry I forgot to mention that the BAR article says the inscription
is believed to date from somewhere between 9th and 7th centuries BCE.
NPL further wrote:
>However, which bytyhwh does the inscription speak of? The one in
>Jerusalem or another one. If we speak of so-called first temple
>period, there were probable scores of temples of YHWH - probably also
>later ... and is it a surprise? After all we have scores if not
>hundred of Yahwistic names from the Iron Age.
Your hypothesis of the existence of umpteen Temples of YHWH in the first
Temple period is interesting. I am looking forward to your evidence
(literary, archaeological, or what?) to support this notion. My mind is
open to the theoretical possibility -- but I hope you will not simply fall
back on an argument that "absence of evidence" is not "evidence of
absence."
That would be only marginally more acceptable than your suggestion in a
recent BAR debate that the likeliest explanation for the Tel Dan
inscription and the Ekron Philistine inscription was that they were fakes
or forgeries. (You might want to take a look at the latest BAR, which
indicates that many scholars have taken its editor to task for printing
that innuendo without comment -- and also includes assorted refutations
thereof.)
jrw@brown.edu