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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Fw: Aramaic to them?
  • Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 11:05:41 -0800

On 03/03/2004 10:42, Dave Washburn wrote:

On Wednesday 03 March 2004 04:41, Peter Kirk wrote:

[snip]

Notice, nowhere do I claim that Hebrew was not
spoken fluently by at least a minority elite,
just that the evidence pointing to a possible
majority of the people speaking Hebrew as
their primary language is weak at best.

The important question here is one you have left open. Do you accept
that there was a continuing community for which Hebrew was the mother
tongue? That is what the DSS evidence strongly suggests, at least for
the period before the destruction of the Temple. And if this did exist,
it is what makes the significant difference from Latin in the modern
period.


I'm not sure why you keep saying this. The DSS are religious documents, and according to the prevailing theory they were written by a splinter *religious* group that separated from the Temple cult. The vast majority of the documents are biblical texts, which of course would be in Hebrew, and the "community" documents set forth religious practices for the group. So the DSS actually seem to argue more in favor of Karl's suggestion. There are no grocery lists, letters from Aunt Bertha, or any such "secular" documents among them, which is what would be needed to make them show that Hebrew was a "mother tongue" to this group. They used Hebrew in their religious documents and practices, but they also had Targums of the biblical texts including Job and Leviticus. So I really don't think the DSS show what you maintain they do.


Dave, the argument which I am summarising is based on technical linguistic examination of the grammatical forms of Hebrew used in the DSS, transitional between late biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew. These forms indicate to the linguists who have looked at this that Hebrew was changing in the ways characteristic of a living language (i.e. one being used as a mother tongue) and not those of a language preserved only in a scholarly or religious community. Now I don't have at hand references to the original papers on this. Perhaps others on the list do.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/





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