Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

Dear Peter,

You asked:

>How about Daniel and Ezra, in the forms found in MT? I don't know 
>exactly what period you are talking about and to what period you 
>assign the texts, but from what I remember you wanted to assign Ezra 
>to not long after Josephus and Daniel to not long before. The mixed 
>forms only make sense if they were intended for a bilingual 
>readership.

Definitely not. Very little makes sense of those mixed forms taken
seriously. Both start ostensibly after because some Aramaic speaking person
opens his mouth or starts writing and our writers continue for several
chapters and then stop for no reason and their texts return to Hebrew. If I
can work under the assumption that Garbini's reasoning for the quality of
the Aramaic is correct (as per the article on my web site), the Aramaic
doesn't represent the time it wants to simulate. But, because Aramaic is
similar to Hebrew and probably similar enough to be relatively intelligible
to any speaker of Hebrew, there is no need for bilingual readership.

>Then we also have to think of the Aramaic words in the Gospels.

Peter, it will be very hard to make anything relevant out of a few random
Aramaic words in NT: 1) you don't know when the texts were written; 2) you
don't know who wrote them; 3) you don't know the connection between the
writers and Palestine. The Aramaic words are usually random and generally
superfluous to the context and could have the sole scope of giving the
appearance of magic.

>On general sociolinguistic grounds (and my experience living in a 
>bilingual city), I would expect a considerable degree of bilingualism, 
>especially in the cities which must have had a mixed population. 

You should have lived in a situation like that in the Albanian villages in
southern Italy. Very little bilingualism. Or perhaps the valleys of England
where from one valley to the next there are differences in dialect; or the
valleys of Switzerland in which there are different languages.

A modern analogy that works on a speech community that has an education
that is extremely different from that of the ancient communities you are
trying to comment on means that the analogy is inappropriate. You don't
even know what the average individual's control of one language was like.

>This 
>would probably be deeper than the basic words needed in the market but 
>well short of the double native speaker proficiency which Henry seems 
>to be suggesting.

Did the average person have more than the basic words in their own
language? We take it for granted that the average person can not only speak
their own language but can read and write it.


Cheers,


Ian

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