ABSTRACT
The archaism of the texts amounts at best to the repetition of a very few archaic forms, chiefly preterites and the suffix. Since these forms are attested at all stages of Biblical Hebrew (BH) poetry, there is no reason why at any time a writer could not make a stylistic choice to load a poem with a number of them to create a 'clustering'. The language of the Archaic Biblical Hebrew (ABH) texts cannot demonstrate the antiquity of those texts. However, Hebrew, along with related languages like Phoenician and Aramaic, is classified in the 'Northwest Semitic' language group. In the second millennium people have some important sources belonging to the Northwest Semitic languages. The most extensive of these are the Amama Letters and the Ugaritic texts. Further, the idea that poetry could not be altered in textual transmission is at odds with the highly fluid textual evidence for poetic books at Qumran, especially Psalms, Song of Songs and Lamentations.
