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  • From: "Harold R. Holmyard III" <hholmyard AT ont.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] GDD (was not: Self-mutilation)
  • Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 09:14:32 -0500

Dear Karl,

We don't know when the Damascus Document was authored, but from the sounds of it, it was centuries after the last of the Hebrew canon.

HH: The date attributed to it is about the first century B.C.

In other words, at a time when the people on the street spoke Aramaic and only the scholars spoke Hebrew more or less fluently (much like the medieval monks spoke Latin). Thus it is very likely that GDD in the Damascus Document is either an Aramaic loan word or a late development of GDWD into a verb.

HH> These ideas that GDD in the Damascus Document is an Aramaic loanword or a back development from a noun are arbitrary assumptions. The Damascus Document is a Hebrew document, and GDD is a biblical word. We don't know that the authors didn't know Hebrew. Quite a lot of the Dead Sea Scrolls, even the non-biblical material such as letters, are in Hebrew. Here is a quote about the Dead Sea Scroll period from _Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation_, by Michael Wise, Martin Abegg, and Edward Cook:

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. . . . Rabbinic Hebrew was shown to be no invention, but simply a development from the ordinary spoken Hebrew of biblical times.

As for the "up-to-date lexicon", have you not noticed my discussions concerning BDB? All of those that I know of since Gesenius have been written with presuppositions that I reject: presuppositions such as evolution, the late development of the Hebrew canon, the backwardness of the ancient Hebrew people,

HH: I reject all these things, too, but they are somewhat irrelevant to the issue of GDD.

and that word usages in cognate languages and in post Biblical Hebrew accurately reflects Biblical Hebrew use. (The last point can often give us clues to rarely used Biblical Hebrew terms, if used with caution.) I find that comparing lexemes with their roots and synonyms within Tanakh more useful for finding accurate definitions than looking at cognate languages.

HH: I don't think lexicons assume that one can transfer wholesale into Hebrew the word usage of cognate languages. I have not really seen that sort of thinking.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard






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