Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> From: Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>
> Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 17:13:01 +0200

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

>> 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 [...]

If most Jews were fluent in Hebrew, why did targums even exist in the
first place?


> If we truly have some sort of cosmopolitan situation as some people
> try to put forward, what I would expect with two such similar
> languages is interplay between the two languages.  This is not found
> in the specific case of ancient Israel, so it would seem that the
> Hebrew and Aramaic communities were quite distinct.

There actually are some minor Aramaic influences on Hebrew (I don't
really remember most of the specifics, because it's been a while since
I've read the specific sections of Blau, Kutscher, etc., but one
obvious example of "interplay" between Aramaic and Hebrew is the
existence of spirantized allophones of the non-emphatic stops in
both).  However, if you were expecting _major_ Aramaic influence, such
an outcome would not in fact necessarily follow from the mere fact of
the existence of language contact -- it pretty much depends on the
attitude of the speakers of a minority language whether there will be
assimilation to the majority language, or an effort to keep the
minority language distinct and pure.


>> Anyway, if you're implying that Ezra is somehow derived from 1
>> Esdras, 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.

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

The only way you could fairly conclude that Ezra is derived from 1
Esdras is if you've already firmly made up your mind that Ezra can't
be historical.  But you need to provide independent external evidence
of the non-historicity of Ezra here.  Ezra is clearly a little
schematized and streamlined (written by chroniclers who tended to find
only certain kinds of events worthy of being recorded, to which they
gave their own definite interpretations), and the whole Ezra-Nehemiah
sequence is a little confusing (different written sources stitched
together, not always in strict chronological order, without
explanations that would make clear the relationship between them), but
the basic non-historicity of Ezra, and its derivation through two
processes of first folklorization and then de-folklorization, is
something which needs to be proven, not assumed.

Anyway, here's a challenge -- compare 2 Samuel with the account of
early Persian monarchs in the Shah-Nameh (both of these writings are
attested in written form roughly about 800 years after the events they
purport to describe), and tell me which one reads more like history?


> 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.

Cute.  Maybe those folkoristic texts Peter Pan and the Epic of
Gilgamesh were also written at the same time?

P.S.  I read a few days ago (in some non-primary source, sorry I can't
give a reference) that some Hittite names are attested in Akkadian
texts ca. 1800 B.C. or perhaps slightly earlier.


>> 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.

Not sure what "magic" means here, since the Aramaic words are usually
immediately glossed in Greek, and are mundane items like "Girl, stand up"
or "father" -- while magical words like "Abraxas" and "abracadabra" are
quite different, imposing and mysteriously meaningless.  I actually think
these little snippets in the new Testament are tendential evidence that
Palestinian Jews did often speak to each other in Aramaic on ordinary
occasions (i.e. not connected with special contexts such as formal
religious worship, Jewish nationalism, etc.).


[Peter Kirk:]

>> 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.

Actually, I'm not really suggesting that; all I'm saying is that it
seems rather doubtful that there was any very significant fraction of
the population that was _more_ fluent in Hebrew than in Aramaic.  This
logically means that if there were a large number of mother-tongue
natively-fluent Hebrew speakers (Ian's position, which I'm somewhat
doubtful about), then there must also have been a large number of
Hebrew-Aramaic bilinguals.

P.S. There's actually a large literature on language contact,
bilingualism, and "code switching" which people could look up, rather
than abstractly speculating and generalizing from anecdotes.

--
Henry Churchyard   churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu   http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/