Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Henry Churchyard <churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>]

Ian -- I think that the fact (if fact it is) that no formal
Hebrew-Aramaic "bilingual", in the sense of the Rosetta stone, has
been found actually points in the opposite direction to what you've
concluded.  Such bilingual inscriptions are found when a state has
multiple official languages, when an agreement is concluded between
two parties who don't have a language in common, etc.  But in
1st. century Judea, it seems that a large majority (at least) of those
who knew Hebrew also knew Aramaic, so that Hebrew and Aramaic were
partially differentiated by function -- Hebrew was used for most
Jewish religious purposes, sometimes in communications between Jews,
and on certain occasions to assert Jewish nationalism, while Aramaic
was used for most other purposes, especially to communicate with
non-Jewish Aramaic speaking inhabitants of the region.  (Aramaic was
also in a slightly anomalous position in not being an offical
language, despite being a widely spoken lingua franca.)

On this view, if there had been less Hebrew-Aramaic bilingualism on
the part of Hebrew speakers, that would have been expected to result
in _more_ Hebrew-Aramaic bilingual documents.

Anyway, if you're implying that Ezra is somehow derived from 1 Esdras,
and 1 Esdras is the one I think it is (some of these Apocryphal books
have different names), with the story of the three courtiers debating
the strength of wine, kings, and women before the Persian monarch,
then I don't really see it -- deriving the non-folklorized Ezra from 1
Esdras (which is rather folkloristic where it differs in a major way
from Ezra) inverts the usual assumptions.


P.S. If this Garbini is the same Garbini who back in the 60's
published a bunch of highly flawed and erronous stuff about Hebrew
_siin_ (a subject that I have studied intensively), then this doesn't
predispose me to place great confidence in anything he might say about
biblical minimalism.  It seems like there was an Italian "minimalist"
movement to eliminate _ghayn_ and probably also _siin_ from
Proto-Semitic, but I don't think much has been heard from them on that
topic recently...


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       % Henry Churchyard         http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/