Review No. 5
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This review was intended to appear in Biblica, but they rejected it because it is not elaborate enough for their readers to understand it without reading the stuff referenced, and because it is a critique only of something that another Biblica author has written. The General Editor went so far as to call my article an answer "ad hominem", which I take to be an answer ad hominem. None of my arguments is based on the person of Carsten Ziegert, of course. He wrote an interesting article, and I had hoped it would be possible to have a relatively fast discussion about it, like e.g. the one we had with Colin J. Humphreys in Vetus Testamentum, back in the day. Arguments were flying back and forth, some of them purely critical, while nobody is supposed to take them personally, of course. But this is not possible in Biblica, I learned. So I put my review here, exactly the same thing that I sent to Biblica except for page header and page count. Btw., I wrote it in English hoping to reach a wider readership for the discussion about Carsten Ziegert's proposal. This review is available as PDF-file only. |
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Carsten Ziegert discarded the notion of the census as a count of individual human beings. Instead, he asserts, military and cultic units are counted only. But his solution proposal is unconvincing and leads to more problems than it solves. It stands in sharp contrast to the context, renders the formal census unnecessary, is inconsistent with the number of the firstborn in Num 3 and the number of the spoils in Num 31. The 603550 beka for the tabernacle in Ex 38,25.26 cannot be explained. |
