Refining Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts: Methodological Considerations for Future UseThe Hebrew Bible corpus is not that large. There is often a small number of examples of a given linguistic feature—too small for statistically significant comparison.My analysis suggests that the cumulative linguistic evidence aligns most coherently with a pre-exilic dating of Isaiah 40-66. In fact, a post-exilic dating would require such extensive redating of other books that the traditional Classical vs. Late Biblical Hebrew distinction becomes unstable.
See also Linguistic dating und das Jesaja-Buch: eine Untersuchung der sprachlichen Entwicklung des Hebräischen im Jesaja-Buch sowie ihre Auswirkung auf die Datierung des Buches und auf die Verwendung des Linguistic Dating im Allgemeinen (Ph.D. dissertation, 2024).
By Samuel Koser
Part-time Lecturer
Bible Study College, Ostfildern
November 2025
Moreover, there is debate about the dating of many of the texts. Even texts composed in the pre-exilic period were edited, possibly heavily edited, in the post-exilic period, when the authoritative books were assembled. So any attempt to date a given HB text by comparing it to other texts in the HB is in danger of circular reasoning.
Comparing HB texts to external epigraphic evidence is more promising. I think that Ugaritic has been helpful for establishing a corpus of early biblical poetry. And attention to the development of Hebrew and Aramaic orthography (spelling) has also made a contribution. But we don't have many Iron Age Northwest Semitic inscriptions, so their usefulness for dating biblical prose is limited.
It is worth asking comparative linguistic questions, even if we won't agree on the answers. This essay has a good discussion of the methodological challenges. I have no opinion on what that means for establishing the date of Isaiah 40-66 on linguistic grounds.
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