Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

This is the title of a paper I stumbled across yesterday in BSOAS 31 (1971)
pp.241-255, written by Edward Ullendorf.

Ullendorf puts forward a thesis in this paper that the language that we see
in the Hebrew biblical texts is only a fragment of a language, ie that
there was a lot more language than displayed in the biblical texts.

His arguments go:

1) there are numerous common words that are probably assumed in the
biblical texts, but not found. For example, there is a word "to sew" [tpr]
and another for "embroidery", but none for needle;

2) there is an extremely high proportion of hapax legomena in the OT/HB:
JewEnc lists 1500, while Rabin found 2440 in Loehler's dictionary; given
that BH has about 7-8000 words, that's an exceptionally high number of
words that have just managed to get into the category of biblical words;

3) many of the hapax legomena are ordinary words such as
    ship      &pynh       Jon 1:5
    medicine  trwpt       Eze 47:12
    need      zrd         2Chr 2:15
    blanket   $mykh       Jdg 4:18

He writes: "Books like Ecclesiastes or Daniel or Esther, which gained entry
into the canon of the OT only by the skin of their teeth... contain more
than a few elements which we would have termed 'post-biblical' had they not
accidentally occurred in these writings. What about p$r 'interpretation'
which Qohelet 8:1 first uses and which appears nowhere else in the OT --
and yet is so central a concept of that period?" He also mentions the
abstract ending "-ut" and a few other items, but I think you will get the
drift of his argumentation: there is a real language hiding behind what we
see in the biblical Hebrew texts.

What do people on the list think of Ullendorf's thesis?


Ian