Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Harold R. Holmyard III" <hholmyard AT ont.com>]

Dear Yigal,

The first article said:

"Jews were probably not speaking Hebrew in the first century," said Rabbi
Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary. "They were
speaking Aramaic."

HH: I gather there was Hebrew speech, too. I have a copy of The Dead Sea
Scrolls: A New Translation. by Michael Wise, Martin Abegg, Jr., and Edward
Cook. The introductory material (p. 9) says this about the use of Hebrew by
the people of first century Israel:

Apart from copies of biblical books, about one out of every six of the Dead
Sea Scrolls is inscribed in Aramaic. Clearly the writing of an Aramaic
Gospel was eminently possible. Yet the vast majority of the scrolls were
Hebrew texts. Hebrew was manifestly the principal literary language for the
Jews of this period. The new discoveries underlined the still living,
breathing, even supple character of that language. A few texts pointed to
the use of Hebrew for speech as well as writing. These works (for example,
A Sectarian Manifesto) displayed a missing-link type of Hebrew,
intermediate between the form of Hebrew used in the Bible and that used by
the rabbis. Rabbinic Hebrew was shown to be no invention, but simply the
development from the ordinary spoken Hebrew of biblical times.

The scrolls have therefore proven that late Second-Temple Jews used various
dialects of Hebrew along with Aramaic. . . . For writing, however, they
generally tried to imitate biblical Hebrew, an older form of the language.
. . . Not all the scroll writers could perform this feat equally well, so
the "correctness" of the Hebrew varies considerably. Modern scholars
actually appreciate the mistakes more than the deft performances, because
the mistakes arise out of the writer's own language usage. The written form
teaches us about the spoken.

                                Yours,
                                Harold Holmyard