Reviewing a historical study of the Tanakh’s grammar and orthography by the linguist Aaron Hornkohl, Joshua Berman notes that it upends much conventional academic scholarship:

There are many hundreds of markers of the difference between early biblical Hebrew and late biblical Hebrew, and they help us date the authorship of the books. Hornkohl’s new book about the development of biblical Hebrew plumbs the most arcane minutiae of biblical grammar and is written for specialists. But his conclusion has the potential to challenge theories about the origins of the Torah widely held in the academy and therefore in our wider cultural discourse.

Hornkohl maintains that the Torah, [i.e., the Five Book of Moses], displays the earliest linguistic profile of any of the books of the Hebrew Bible and that this is evident in hundreds of places across its five books.

If Hornkohl is correct that the Torah uniquely preserves so many pre-monarchic, [i.e. more ancient] linguistic features and presents a linguistic profile that is earlier than that found in the other books of the Hebrew Bible, the question stands: could that implicitly suggest that the Torah is the earliest of the Bible’s compositions? This flies in the face of what many Bible scholars today believe.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.