On Dating Biblical Books

I am very much interested in the dating of Biblical books, especially as it pertains to Ecclesiastes and Job.

Usually  - they are both dated late (especially Ecclesiastes).   Of course – there are some scholars that date Ecclesiastes early – in the monarchic period.  Two of these are Dan Fredericks (more recently in his commentary on Ecclesiastes) and Ian Young.

The debate on dating biblical texts is fairly intense. For some relevant links to this debate and also links to some useful articles on dating, see the latest post from Robert Holmstedt.

As you can see, the debate is fairly intense between Ron Hendel and Young, Rezetko etc. .

JoAnn Hacket, Phil David, Lemche, Tania Notarius, Lenzi, George Athas and even Bill Schniedewind pitched in (see the comments on Hendel’s response).  This is certainly getting interesting.

I still think that we need to be humbler in the dating of some (most?) books…because in my opinion “we are working with no data” – to steal a quote from Thomas Lambddin (admittedly - I have no idea in what context he used it ).