Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Yigal:

Your daughter must be exceptional, but being your daughter, that should be 
expected, right?

I have not studied medieval French and German, yet both of those two 
languages have changed so little over a thousand years (I don’t know about 
the last few decades since I left college) that medieval versions of those 
languages was easier for me to understand than King James English.

Yet I asked several Israelis if they read Tanakh, and except for the 
religiously inclined, most indicated that they did not, and the primary 
reason given is that they found it difficult to understand. They blamed the 
language differences.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Yigal Levin" <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>

> I agree. We have such a limited corpus of "Biblical Hebrew" that I don't
> think that it is possible to really "think" (that is, have creative,
> original thoughts) in it. However Biblical Hebrew is part of a linguistic
> process, which includes Second Temple, Mishnaic, Gaonic, Medieval and Modern
> Hebrew. Beyond the widely expanded lexicon, MH is not that different than
> BH. My second grade daughter (for those of y'all who don't know, I live in
> Israel) reads the Bible much more easily that a second grade American could
> read the KJV - obviously not on an adult level, but most of the basic
> vocabulary and syntax is no problem for her. The fact that so many fine
> Bible scholars feel that they can ignore anything written in MH is very
> problematic - no scholar of, say, Medieval French or German literature would
> ever be able to get away with not reading Modern French or German.
> 
> Yigal
-- 
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