A "Dominican" Was Wrong

I will not comment on all of Damien Mackey's essay of pre-Flood writings, though I will share it here, by this link:

Noachic Flood, Ark Mountain, First Writing
Damien Mackey
https://www.academia.edu/123039566/Noachic_Flood_Ark_Mountain_First_Writing

I have already answered his allegation on Bible being "against" a Global Flood:

Was Noah's Flood and Ark Textually Possible? Interrupting Refutation of Robert A. Moore to Turn to Damien Mackey https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2024/08/was-noahs-flood-and-ark-textually.html

However, I will separately answer a Dominican he met:

An extremely well-educated and intelligent Dominican priest once declared to me that “Moses and Joshua wrote nothing, that writing was not invented until about the time of King David (c. 1000-900 BC)”, and this despite passages such as Exodus 34:27: “Then the Lord told Moses, ‘Write down these words, because I’m making a Covenant with you and with Israel according to these words’”, and Joshua 8:32: “There, in the presence of the Israelites, Joshua wrote on stones a copy of the Law of Moses”.

I hope for the good education and intelligence of this Dominican who supposedly had extreme amounts of both, he meant Hebrew writing.

Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_alphabet

Letters that look like *this:

Have been found in the timeperiod dated to:

c. 1000 BCE BC – 135 CE AD

It is supposedly derived from the Phœnician alphabet.

c. 1050–150 BC

But that one in turn was derived from the Proto-Sinaitic script

I'll cite a passage about one of the inscriptions:

The date of the inscriptions is mostly placed in the 17th or 16th century BC.[28] An alternative view dates most of the inscriptions to the reign of Amenemhat III or his successor circa 1800 BC.[29] It has been suggested that the dating period includes the reign of pharaoh Senwosret III.

According to **David Down, whom I follow in this, Senusret III is the pharao who died in the times just after Moses was born, the child killer. Amenemhat III is the man whom Moses was living at the court of. He would have been close enough to Serabit el-Khadim, when going to Mount Sinai, but would probably already have been aware of the Proto-Sinaitic script as a simplification of the Hieroglyphs he equally knew.

Obviously, it is true that scrolls of the law between the time of Moses and those of King David have not been found in Proto-Sinaitic. But most of this time, the scrolls would have been kept in the Tabernacle, the temple before the temple that was a tent. There would be few of them at a time, since only the priesthood (including Levites) were required to read them, the bulk of the Israelites were only supposed to hear them spoken by the High Priest.

And he commanded them, saying: After seven years, in the year of remission, in the feast of tabernacles When all Israel come together, to appear in the sight of the Lord thy God in the place which the Lord shall choose, thou shalt read the words of this law before all Israel, in their hearing Deuteronomy 31:10-11

So, with few scrolls in a temple that strolled around, as tabernacles do, as well as other tents, the lack of archaeological evidence of writing in Hebrew for this period is clearly understandable.

What is less so is the fact that people can get away with wearing the Dominican habit and stating the kind of stupid, halfbaked semi-arguments that are so easy to refute with a little wikipedia ***search, pretty much like Casey Cole is wearing a Franciscan habit which he dishonours by maligning the Constantinian shift in the 300's or Fourth Century on a video.

Certain people have a very solid security of superiority from social prejudice that's floating around and being welcomed for all sorts of bad reasons, and it is based on very little learning. Though even they could often enough refute a Protestant claiming to disown Biblical support from Catholic doctrines they have opposed since the Reformation.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Samuel
20.VIII.2024

In Judaea sancti Samuelis Prophetae, cujus sancta ossa (ut beatus Hieronymus scribit) Arcadius Augustus Constantinopolim transtulit, et prope Septimum collocavit.

* Source:

22 letters of Phoenician alphabet and Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
Tsp2 - Own work | CC0 | File:PaleoHebrew.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_alphabet#/media/File:PaleoHebrew.svg

** Here is his article:

Searching for Moses
by David Down | This article is from
Journal of Creation 15(1):53–57, April 2001
https://creation.com/searching-for-moses

*** There is an official reason why Academics hate wikipedia. It's not original research and it can alter original research to suit the flow of the text. But there is a more real reason. Very often an Academic who has looked on only a narrow part of the research (for instanc ignoring all of the Creation Science) can be refuted very quickly by a look at wikipedia, and he doesn't like that.