Biblical Texts Cannot be Dated Linguistically

Linguistic evidence alone is not able to date biblical texts. Among the arguments challenged in this paper are that the archaic linguistic forms of Archaic Biblical Hebrew poems such as the Song of Moses in Exodus 15 demonstrate the great antiquity of those texts; that Standard Biblical Hebrew, such as the prose of the book of Samuel, is a phenomenon restricted to the pre-exilic or monarchic period of Israelite history; and that biblical texts which share the features of Late Biblical Hebrew as it is exemplified in works such as the book of Chronicles could only have been written in the post-exilic period. Modern text critical research indicates that we cannot be certain that the linguistic profile of the text we have is that of the original author. Nor, even if it is original, is any aspect of linguistic evidence necessarily indicative of only one chronological period of the Hebrew language.