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  • From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Aramaic to Hebrew language switch?
  • Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2010 16:38:10 +0200

Dear Jim,

Some years ago a Hungarian scholar walked around in Mea Shearim in Jerusalem. Suddenly he was shocked, because he heard someone speak old Hungarian, which was a dead language at that time (it was believed). The group of Hungarians living there had kept their native tongue free from outside influence for more than one hundred years.

The point here is that there are many factors that can keep a language "pure" for a long time, or that it can become mixed with other languages. For example, Amharic, the main language of Ethiopia, has many Berber words, while Tigrinja is much closer to Old Ethiopic (GeĀ“ez). Different factors must have caused this difference. Therefore, in my view the number of loan words from other languages in Hebrew will not tell us anything regarding the origin of Hebrew or where persons speaking Hebrew lived in ancient times.

BTW. The language of the Mesha stele (Moabite) is very close to biblical Hebrew, but Ugaritic is written completely differently from Hebrew and cannot be confused with Hebrew. True, there are great numbers of similar words in Hebrew and Ugaritic, and I think Uri is right when he says that a speaker of ancient Hebrew would be able to understand much of what an Ugaritic speaker said. But still Hebrew and Ugaritic are two completly different languages. And what in the world is "Canaanite"?


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo


Rolf Furuli:

You wrote: "[I]f I understand Jack correctly, he would say that this language definitely was not Hebrew because the ancestors of the later Hebrew-speaking people did not yet live in Canaan."

The Hebrews always lived in Canaan. Most historians agree that the Hebrews are indigenous to Canaan, and that there is no evidence of the Hebrews as a people spending any considerable time in Egypt. Just look at the language of Biblical Hebrew, which is this list's long suit. The Northwest Semitic words found in the Amarna Letters are for the most part words that are found in the Bible (though naturally the form often varies). There's precious little Akkadian influence on Hebrew. And there's also very little Egyptian influence on Hebrew. By contrast, Canaanite and Moabite, to the extent we can reconstruct those languages, and the vast corpus of Ugaritic literature, have a very similar vocabulary to Biblical Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew has only 70 loanwords from Akkadian (per Paul V. Mankowski), and only 40 certain loanwords from Egyptian (per T.O. Lambdin's classic study in 1953). Yet one cannot even talk about the concept of "loanwords" in Hebrew from Canaanite or Ugaritic, because the vocabulary is so similar.

If we look at the language of early Biblical Hebrew in the Patriarchal narratives, the history of the Hebrews is staring us in the face. The Hebrews did not originate in Mesopotamia. The word (BR-Y/"Hebrew" does not mean "the crossing a boundary people". Rather, the Hebrews are indigenous to Canaan, as the author of the Patriarchal narratives knows and reflects in his composition. The language of the rest of the Bible confirms that the Hebrews did not spend their formative years in Egypt, because there is so little influence of Egyptian on Biblical Hebrew.

Some scholars say that NYXX at Genesis 8: 21, meaning "sweet" in Hebrew, comes from the Egyptian word for "eternity", NXX, but that seems a big stretch to me. Of course, "pharaoh" obviously comes from Egyptian, as would be expected. Interestingly, going the other direction, Egyptian has a large number of Semitic loanwords. But that is not surprising, considering all the Canaanites who wandered into Egypt over the centuries, and the period of Hyksos rule over Egypt.

You know Hebrew. It's difficult to distinguish Hebrew from Canaanite and Ugaritic and Moabite. Yet it's hard to find many Akkadian or Egyptian loanwords in Biblical Hebrew. The language of Biblical Hebrew itself is telling us that (i) the Hebrews are indigenous to Canaan, and (ii) the Hebrews did not spend their formative years in Egypt. The Hebrews were always in beloved Canaan. That's what the Patriarchal narratives say, and that's what both history and linguistics confirm.

Jim Stinehart
Evanston, Illinois




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