ABSTRACT
Scholars had established a clear literary chronology and from that they built a linguistic chronology because there were linguistic differences between older and newer texts to go by. Biblical Hebrew linguists seemed impervious to the shattering of the consensus. They even used the linguistic chronology established by the bygone consensus to argue that the consensus chronology must have been correct in the first place, somewhat circularly one might say. In linguistic circles it was received wisdom that the Masoretic Text was an outstanding text preserving an incredible amount of old features. The main objective of Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts was to show that linguistic dating of biblical texts is not feasible with the evidence and methods we currently possess. Further it contains a massive overview of the linguistic variation found in biblical manuscripts from Qumran, particularly the books of Samuel. It is hard to fathom the extent of this variation.
