Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Deborah Millier <deborahmillier AT yahoo.com>]

K. Penner asked:

> 1. How do you distinguish between 
> LBH and MH? (This is not a rhetorical
> question; I do want to know the method.) 
> You listed as LBH: DSS (including 
> Copper Scroll and 4QMMT), Ben Sira, 
> 1Macc, Formal written materials and 
> virtually all literary Texts.
>
> And MH: Cave of Letters, Cave of 
> Horrors, Murabba'at, ABBA.

James Barr, who to my knowledge was the first to coin
the term "Middle Hebrew" describes his criteria for
the distinctions in chapter 3 of the Cambridge History
of Judaism, under the sub-section "Hebrew" (pp.79-90).
 In a nutshell they are:

1) elements that are genuinely semitic but which are
not regularly found in either biblical Hebrew or
Aramaic.  Examples:

(a) SHE virtually replaces ASHER; 
(b) the construct state is noticeably restricted in
use, resulting in increased use of SHEL; 
(c) substantive differences in the use of the article
HA- (e.g. COHEN GADOL instead of COHEN HA-GADOL;
K'NESET HA-G'DOLA--the article on the adjective alone;
etc.); 
(d) the VAV conversive system has completely fallen
out of use;
(e) the imperfect comes to be limited to a basic modal
form denoting intentions, wishes, and prayers;
(f) use of participle tense grows enormously in use,
including a greatly extended use of the participle
plus HAYA to mark repeated, usual, or concurrent
action;
(g) numerous lexical developments, including differing
forms of the same roots (e.g. NIKNAS instead of KANAS;
NAHAG [drive] expanded to mean "behave" [i.e. drive
oneself]), not to mention more concentrated doses of
loanwords from Akkadian, Persian, Aramaic, and Greek.

2) elements in LBH that are common to biblical Hebrew
and Aramaic, but are not seen in MH (you probably get
the point here; I'm too tired to fish them out and
list them).

3) there are easily seen continuities between LBH and
MH, so the distinction is useful up to a point.

> 2. What do you mean by 1 Maccabees being 
> "preserved" in Hebrew?

I was drawing directly from Buth's material here. 
Sorry for being uncritical.  If Randy is lurking,
perhaps he can defend this statement.  Or correct me. 
To my knowledge there is only an assumed [by some]
Hebrew vorlage to 1 Maccabees, not a "hard copy." 
Anybody know differently?

> 3. Why do you say Pharisees used 
> Hebrew for their oral traditions? 
> How could one know this?

This is born from the assumption that the MISHNA
reflects the *oral* communications of the Tannaim,
which, if that's the case, were obviously in Hebrew.

> 4. I am hesitant to think of 
> Targumim as simply "repositories 
> of exegetical traditions" rather 
> than primarily translations. Too 
> much of them read as very direct 
> translation, with very little exegesis.

Well,...you would be right not to think of TARGUMIM as
"*simply* 'repositories of exegetical traditions.'" 
But they are at least that.  More than mere
translations at any rate.  It is helpful, I think, to
recognize that some TARGUMIM are often woodenly
literal translations (some are not even that!) from
Hebrew to Aramaic, but from time to time they will
simply surprise the modern reader with expansions,
deletions, or even reversals of meaning to the P'SHAT
of the Hebrew, based primarliy on a MIDRASHIC
hermeneutic.  This owes to the exegetical traditions
which they preserve.

> The "Second Temple" period is very 
> long, and I would shy away from 
> saying "virtually all" Judean 
> literature was Hebrew in this 
> period. Where do you fit the 
> (Aramaic) Enochic literature and 
> the New Jerusalem texts? Enoch 
> at least seems hugely popular, 
> and NJ was found in surprisingly 
> large numbers in most Qumran caves. 
> Are these exceptional because of 
> provenance (Galilee, perhaps?)?

I would fit these and the few other Aramaic and Greek
texts into the category of "important exceptions"--but
exceptions nonetheless.

Hope this helps.  Again, I merely compiled information
together.  I am not prepared to defend every detail,
although your probing questions help me to examine
some crucial issues.  At the end of the day though it
seems obvious that the "Hebrew was basically a dead
language" model needs some serious re-consideration.

Shalom,
-- Michael Millier

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