Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Schmuel <schmuel AT escape.com>]

Hi b-hebrew,

Ken Penner wrote:
>I'd also like to see evidence for both sides: Hebrew dying out and Hebrew
>remaining an everyday spoken language.
>I recently delivered a paper to the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies on
>the question of whether the Greek words Hebrais/Hebraisti refer to Hebrew or
>Aramaic, and necessarily had to touch on the likelihood of Hebrew surviving
>as a spoken language.

Schmuel
Can the Greek word also refer to both ?  ie. the family of semitic 
languages...
ie .. does it have to be an either/or proposition ?  

Is your paper, or a summary, available ?

There has been a lot of stuff said on this issue over on another forum, often 
with
little scholarly backup, sometimes with hot air, and it would be nice to see 
a 
scholarly summary, including the NT usage, and the Josephus usage, and 
whatever
else you have found :-)

>I'd be interested to hear how put it all together:
>
>Why are parts of Ezra and Daniel in Aramaic?
>Why and when did the Targumim appear?
>Why are there more Second Temple Aramaic inscriptions than Hebrew?
>Why is so much early Second Temple religious literature in Aramaic (the
>several parts of Enoch, Tobit, Genesis Apocryphon, New Jerusalem, etc.)?
>Why do the Maccabean coins have Hebrew rather than Aramaic?
>Why are so many more Semitic words (even those called Hebraisti) in the
>Christian scriptures Aramaic rather than Hebrew?
>Why do the Aramaic Bar Kokhba letters outnumber the Hebrew ones?
>Why is the inscription on Jesus' cross said to have been in Roman, Greek,
>and "Hebraisti", without mention of Aramaic?
>Why does a Bar Kokhba letter-writer apologize for writing in Greek rather
>than "ebraesti", without mentioning Aramaic?
>Why does Philo say the Bible was written in "Chaldean"?
>Do any ancient writers ever call Aramaic Hebrew?

Interesting list of questions :-)

>I have some hypotheses, but I'd like to hear your views first.

After you Alphonse.. most definitely, Gaston :-) 

Shalom,
Steven Avery
Queens, NY
www.messiahresearch.com

>Ken Penner, M.C.S. (Biblical Languages, Greek Focus), M.A. (Hebrew Poetry)
>Ph.D. (cand.), McMaster University
>pennerkm AT mcmaster.ca
>Flash! Pro: http://socserv.socsci.mcmaster.ca/westerholm/flash or
>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flash_pro/join or 
>http://sensoft.nav.to

schmuel AT escape.com

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