Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Hebrew and Aramaic are simply not linguistic "dialects", considering
that Aramaic must have split off from the Hebrew-Phoenician-Moabite-etc.
branch before 1500 B.C (possibly considerably before).  It's true that
"wave" diffusion worked against "tree" separate development in
preserving linguistic similarity, but the end result was that there
would have been only a rather limited mutual intelligibility between
monolingual speakers of the two languages.  Just look at the numerals
from one to three -- the number "two" would be totally incomprehensible
between Hebrew and Aramaic speakers unless it had been specifically
learned (i.e. unless bilingualism was acquired with respect to that
word), while the number "three" could only be understood in the light of
a working knowledge of corrrespondences between Hebrew and Aramaic
(i.e., that Hebrew [sh] often corresponds to Aramaic [t]).  Consider
2 Kings 19:26ff.

It may not be obvious from the abridged translation, but the
Shahnameh, if I remember correctly, is actually supposed to be a
history from the creation to the Arab conquest according to native
Persian sources (written up by a court poet, not an epic folk bard),
and the Khosrows are historical monarchs of the Sassanid dynasty.
Polybius is not writing at a time distance even remotely approaching
800 years after the events he purports to describe, and so is totally
irrelevant in terms of the comparison I was making.

It's a no-brainer that there will be more archeological and epigraphical
evidence for (some of) Josephus than for the New Testament, since
Josephus frequently describes large-scale political-military events,
while the NT is most concerned with smaller personages who were not
political movers and shakers.  Jesus did stir up a fuss among the Jewish
religious-political leadership, but not necessarily more so than a
number of messianic figures and/or political revolutionaries and/or
bandits who were active during that period.  But anyway, inscriptions
mentioning Pontius Pilate and Nazareth have turned up in the past fwe
decades.

You're right that the Wadi Murabba'at documents indicate some secular
role for Hebrew (more than the DSS, I think), but legal documents are
still a long way from haggling for vegetables in the marketplace; and
since they were found in a "Bar Kochba" context, there's the factor of
self-conscious Jewish nationalism to consider.

>> Do you have evidence for Hebrew/Aramaic interpreters?

> I guess Pontius Pilate was supposed to have been speaking either
> Hebrew or Aramaic -- or was the crowd able to understand Latin?

Actually, Pontius Pilate would most probably know Greek (as Roman
gentleman generally did), and there also probably would have been enough
Greek-speakers in the crowd so that those who did understand it could
explain it to those who didn't, so it could be theoretically possible
for translators to be dispensed with (of course, I'm only speculatiing
on probabilities here).

--
         --Henry Churchyard     churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu