Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org> 
 
> 
>  
> Well, it would be interesting to see the details and the evidence given.  
> Yes, the apostle Peter's Galilean accent was recognised in Jerusalem in  
> the 1st century CE, but a recognisable difference of accent may go along  
> with an almost identical literary style. 
>  
I did notice a difference. Apparently Galileean Aramaic had more of the Taus 
transliterated as taus in Greek instead of Judean Aramaic they were almost 
universally 
thetas, similarly Peh was pi instead of phi. Since pronunciation changes 
usually take 
place in the population and/or cultural centers first, and later in the 
countryside, 
that suggests to me that there was a pronunciation change occuring during the 
first 
century. 
>  
> I continue to reject this conclusion. Firstly, the premise is not true  
> as there are differences in style and language. But even if it were  
> true, there is nothing to stop skilled authors in later centuries and  
> quite different places from deliberately mimicking the style of the  
> earlier books. To show this, consider that a skilled writer in America  
> could today produce texts which are stylistically identical to  
> Shakespeare (I don't say with the same artistic merit), but that does  
> not prove that they were written in 16th-17th century England. 
>  
That is just what I notice in Hebrew: the pre-Galut Babel texts, like Isaiah, 
Torah, 
Proverbs, Jeremiah being the last one, tended to have a more complex literary 
style than 
the post Galut texts like Kings, Chronicles, Nehemiah, even Ezra. The post 
Galut writers 
did not have the same facility with Hebrew language, possibly because they 
were not as 
fluent in the language (which would be the case if those who returned from 
Babel tended 
to speak Aramaic at home and on the street, reserving Hebrew for religion, 
government 
and official records). The later writers copied the earlier style, in fact, 
were closer 
to the style found in the Torah (the earliest Hebrew texts that survive) than 
the 
latter, pre-Galut writers. 
 
Karl W. Randolph. 
>  
> --  
> Peter Kirk 
> peter AT qaya.org (personal) 
> peterkirk AT qaya.org (work) 
> http://www.qaya.org/ 
-- 
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