Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

At 00.56 15/07/99 -0500, Henry Churchyard wrote:
>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.  

Sorry, Henry, this doesn't make sense to me. There are no examples of
exercises showing equivalents in both languages; there are no comments in
one language on a text in another language. In fact there is nothing
written that I know of that would support a bilingual thesis. It is simply
unfounded.

>But in
>1st. century Judea, it seems that a large majority (at least) of those
>who knew Hebrew also knew Aramaic, 

There is no evidence for this bilingualism. There is only evidence of a
strong Aramaic influence on the Hebrew of the DSS.

>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.)

The best you can say is that Herod strongly disapproved of the use of
Hebrew as it was used by the tail-end of the Hasmonean dynasty for
political purposes.

>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.

As it is evident that DSS Hebrew was a spoken language (see Qimron's "The
Hebrew of the DSS" chapters on orthography and phonology) and there is a
DSS Hebrew "targum" of Isaiah (why not simply copy it in BH?), you are
trying to argue against the only evidence in the matter: the abundant
Hebrew texts we have.

>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,

This is the version that Josephus knew and loved.

>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) 

Perhaps it was written around the time of other "folkloristic" texts, such
as Esther, Judith and Tobit, or even Genesis, Exodus and Joshua, were
written. 

I'd tend to think that it would lose the "folkloristic" touch rather than
gain it, especially during the post-destruction interest in Ezra.

>inverts the usual assumptions.

Yup. Assumptions.

And Garbini is the professor of Semitic Studies at Rome's "La Sapienza"
University, the principal university of Rome. I have put his article,
"Biblical Aramaic", which touches on Ezra, on the web, if you are
interested, and you'll find it from this page:

                www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/5210/histreli.htm



Cheers,


Ian

>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...