Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Charles David Isbell" <cisbell AT home.com>]

In my view, Ullendorf is almost certainly correct.  In fact, it may be more
appropriate to speak of biblical Hebrew as a dialect of Canaanite than as a
language proper.
Charles David Isbell
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ian Hutchesson" <mc2499 AT mclink.it>
To: "Biblical Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2000 5:54 PM
Subject: "Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?"


> 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
>
>
>
>
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