Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

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