Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

At 07.43 15/05/99 -0500, Jack Kilmon wrote:
>
>
>Ian Hutchesson wrote:
>> 
>> At 23.42 14/05/99 -0500, Jack Kilmon wrote:
>> >Targums are very Jewish, Dan.  They can be a paraphrase or a direct
>> >translation of a Hebrew text in the common language...Aramaic.
>> 
>> Understand of course that this is only Jack's point of view
>
>And the view of the majority of ANE historians and linguists.

That's somewhat what the following phrase indicated, though I would not
want to be as precise as you have here.

>> -- and that of
>> many -- who want to believe that Hebrew was not a working language of the
>> day, despite the fact that there were three dialects of Hebrew evidenced at
>> Qumran, and a literature showing that Hebrew was seen as a spoken language,
>> ie phonetic decisions were being made by the scribes. (A perusal of
>> Qimron's book on DSS Hebrew should show the living nature of the
>> phonological decisions of the scribes.)
>
>The view that Hebrew was not a working language of the day is
>no longer held by "many."  Hebrew was indeed a living language,
>developing dialects, among certain social pockets, including
>the religious elite and certainly the DSS people, whether the
>scrolls were from a sequestered group at Qumran, Jerusalem or
>perhaps even the temple itself.  It was not the evry day
>language of the common folk.
>
>If Hebrew was the common tongue of the common folk, there
>would be no Targums, would there?

Stop guessing, Jack. The logic gets nowhere and is simply tendentious. You
saw how much Aramaic was around in the DSS corpus and as you have no other
window into the period you can't make any claims about the
representativeness of that collection. It is the only one we've got and it
shows Hebrew texts at a majority of 4 to 1.

One angle you have never contemplated was that Hebrew was the working
language of Jerusalem and with the conquest of Samaria under John Hyrcanus
and the "forced conversion" of the Samaritans there was a need for Aramaic
translations.

We have at least three situations to contemplate in the few centuries
before the turn of the era rather than your guessing. 1) Aramaic was the
common language; 2) Hebrew was the common language; and 3) the language use
was heterogeneous. I tend toward the second (at least for Jerusalem), but
then I'm biased by the DSS, though you will note that the Hasmoneans tended
to issue coins that had both Hebrew and Greek inscriptions, to the basic
exclusion of Aramaic.

>> So it is unlikely that there was a simplistic situation in which one could
>> describe Aramaic as the "common language".
>
>Well, we have been down this road before.

And you haven't added anything to the argument this time either.

Jack, you persist in this belief of yours that actually has no evidence to
support it. You've seen that both Aramaic and Hebrew were used during the
time of Shimeon ben Kosebah -- as well as Greek -- so you can't draw any
conclusions from that information, as the texts were of all text types.
Josephus used Hebrew, though you try the redefinition of "language of our
fathers" to mean Aramaic, which doesn't really make sense as the "language
of our fathers". You might also contemplate the fact that the writer of
2Macc (15:36) talks of Aramaic as the Syrian language, ie clearly not that
of Jerusalem.


Ian