Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Niels Peter Lemche <npl AT teol.ku.dk>]

        Dear Peter,

        i have not been out of the list but do not intend to get absorbed in
questions about the historicity of the patriarchs and such matters again-at
least not for the time being. 

        It is a truism that written literary language is often different
from the spoken language. You have it in almost-if not in every place where
writing has been introduced. Some well-known examples: Arabic, classic
Arabic versus the language spoken in Morocco, Iraq, Egypt, you name it.
Classical Arabic makes it possible for people living in the Machreb to
understand people living in the east, as the spoken language is very
different. Norwegian has two forms, bokmål and New Norwegian, but indeed
many local dialects. Greek has its katharevousa and its demotikee (official
language versus the popular language). Even a tiny country like my own have
spoken dialects that I can hardly understand-the differences can be
considerable-but only one written language. If we get to English, the
situation is quite hopeless.

        Of course we know nothing about how Hebrew was spoken in ancient
Palestine and Syria. We only know non-literary forms of the language from a
few letters and casual inscriptions, and even here it is not spoken language
but an adapted spoken language. It does never demonstrate the particulars of
the written Biblical narrative, although it is as far as morphology is
concerned the same language-I already said what is the 'big' difference so I
need not repeat it here. Now we can posit that Hebrew changed at a certain
point to standard biblical Hebrew that again turned to something that
'forgot' the 'grammar' of standard biblical Hebrew. It would make sense if
1) there existed all the way through the centuries a specific written
language (that has been the case in Arabic), slightly different from the
spoken language of the time-a kind of learned language for writing
literature-or 2) a specific language was constructed-more or less like Ben
Yehuda constructed 'Ivrit out of Middle Hebrew (the language of the Mishnah)
with the purpose of writing biblical literature. I do not think that
linguistics can distinguish between the two options and be turned into an
instrument of a diachronic study of the language (I could also mention other
options like socio-dialects, regional differences and more).

        So what can options 1 and 2 tell us: we can imagine a situation
where certain people at a certain historical moment decided to compose a
narrative about the history of their society and for that purpose 'created'
a special literary Hebrew. We can also think of a tradition where a learned
language existed all the time from the beginning of Hebrew literature and
down to the end of the time of composition of biblical scripture and was
used for this literature. Since we have no royal inscriptions or annals from
Palestine in the Iron Age in Hebrew, we cannot tell whether or not the
second possibility, i.e. a continuous history of a learned, literary
language is likely.

        OK?

        NPL




        Dear NPL,

        Welcome back to this list!

        I wonder if you can explain the distinction you make below between
        "developed literary" forms of language and colloquial ones? Do you
have
        objective criteria for distinguishing between these, when you find
both in
        different written texts? I am afraid that I am sceptical of such
        distinctions; even if they are valid in Latin, they certainly need
not be in
        Hebrew.

        Peter Kirk