Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

Dear Henry,

Thanks for your response. I gather from it that there isn't any direct
evidence for bilingualism in Josephus's time.

Will you concede that there is a fair chance that he was a native speaker
of Hebrew or would you like to claim that he was tri-lingual? He claims
that his intention was to "do no more than translate the Hebrew books into
the Greek language" (AJ 10,10,6)

>>> 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?

I don't deny that there were Aramaic communities. The Idumeans and the
numerous other peoples were brought under the Judaic yoke by people like
John Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus.

>> 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.

All granted. The evidence from Qumran is that there was such an influence.

>>> 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.  

1) the book of Ezra is confused about the procession of Persian
   reigns, a usual indicator -- as in Daniel -- of a work
   written long after the period (Josephus corrects this);
2) the Aramaic in it doesn't represent the period it wants to;
3) the use of theophoric references in Ezra indicates that it
   is secondary to 1 Esdras;
4) no citations of Ezra exist until well into this era;
5) where one would expect mention of Ezra (eg Ben Sira) there
   is silence: he is supposed to be a more important Zadokite
   than Simon the Just: in the hundreds of years of the
   theocracy there are no indications of this son of Seraiah,
   high priest and grandfather of Jeshua.

>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), 

Confusing is a mild term. Religious historians have tried to make sense out
of the relationship between the two works for a very long time. Ezra came
first. No, Nehemiah came first. All using arbitrary criteria for
maintaining the maximum literalness. The simple fact is that Ezra is
claimed to have been an uncle of Jeshua -- the Jeshua who was responsible
with Zerubbabel for the first substantial return to Jerusalem and the
building of the temple, but we could stop being literal here if that fact
doesn't suit.

>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.

Nice try. 

There was no "process" of "folklorization": this is only your theory and
based on what, I don't know. 1 Esdras was simply written as it was in a
genre in which parts of Daniel, Esther, Judith, Tobit, Genesis, Joshua, and
even 2 Maccabees belong.

The assumption that Ezra has any historical value needs to proven, not
assumed -- as I said last post. There are good indications that Ezra is not
a historical work (some listed above). 

>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?

(I don't have access to works such as the one you cite. Is it available on
the net?)

Does semblance of history make something history?

Literature is always literature, whether it has the semblance of history or
not. While I can show you strong evidence for most of the families that
make up the 18th - 20th dynasties of Egyptian history, including most
bodies, tombs and contemporary literature, which gives me a basis for
building an Egyptian history for that period, what evidence (archaeological
or epigraphic) can you provide for any period of ancient Hebrew history?

History is based on evidence not semblances. 

>> 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?

At least try to stick to the genre. Do you find the "folkloristic" aspects
of Genesis not analogous to that of 1 Esdras? Perhaps, as you introduced
the term, you might like to define it, for your mention of "Peter Pan" has
too many overtones while seeming inappropriate for the context of ancient
Hebrew literature.

>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.  

They had no value in the discourse of the text. They could be gibberish
that tend to authenticate the "veracity" of the events by impressing the
reader. (Books written about countries will tend to use a few words from
that country to create the atmosphere of the country.) It's intention seems
analogous to the pseudo-Chancelry Aramaic in Ezra. 

>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.  

Why do you think this? You are stating the opinion again, yet providing
nothing for anyone to see why you believe this.

>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.

Please feel free to quote some of this literature relevantly for our
situation, Henry.


Cheers,


Ian