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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: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 18:41:29 -0500

Dear Dave,

I'm sorry that i sent that last post to you instead of b-hebrew. Thanks for relaying it to b-hebrew in your reply.

> > > HH: My first guess would be that there were three languages in use. A
>>
>> good number of scholars say that.
>
>Definitely they were. The question is, which was used for what purposes?
>That's where we differ.

HH: Here's an interesting quote from apparent experts in the Hebrew
language and linguistics, Bernard Spolsky and Elana Shohamy:
http://www.biu.ac.il/hu/lprc/Hebrew_after_a_century_of_RLS_efforts.htm

The process of shifting from the use of Hebrew as a spoken
vernacular may have started as early as the sixth century BCE, and
certainly was well along for many living in ancient Israel by the
beginning of the common era (Chomsky 1957; Rabin 1973). How long
Hebrew continued to be spoken among Jews is a matter of some debate
but it is now generally believed that there were still monolingual
speakers of Hebrew in villages of Judaea at the time of the Bar
Kochba Revolt, in the second century of the Common Era, and native
speakers even later.

It's a tantalizing quote, to be sure, but upon reading the article I don't see
any evidence given, and statements like "it is now generally believed" really
don't do anything for me. What does "generally" mean? "Believed" by whom?
They don't say, and give no backing for such a statement. Simply citing
"apparent experts" isn't going to get us very far.


HH: Here's a quote from David Steinberg with names. I give some introductory material to show your side of things, too. The second to last paragraph makes my point:
http://www.adath-shalom.ca/history_of_hebrew.htm#biblicalheb

With the destruction of the First Temple (587 BCE) the scribal schools and royal patronage of writers ended, Jerusalem was depopulated, the country was ruined and much of the population was exiled to Babylonia where the common language was Aramaic. Later, a small number of Babylonian Jews, probably mainly Aramaic speaking, returned to Judah where they provided the leadership, under Persian imperial patronage, for a slow restoration of Jerusalem and a much reduced Judah known as the province of Yahud.

When written sources again give us a look in, the linguistic situation of the country was:

· Greek was widely spoken in (see map of Hellenistic and Herodian Cities):
o Coastal plain;
o Decapolis (Jordan Valley north of the main Jewish area in Trans-Jordan);
o Greek cities within Jewish areas in Galilee;
o Greek cities within Samaritan populated areas of central and northern Samaria;
o Greek cities within Idumean areas in the northern Negev i.e. what was formerly the southern section of the territory of the tribe of Judah.

· Aramaic was the majority language of the country. Probably it was the only language, other than Greek, spoken throughout the country except for some areas of Judea between Lod and Jericho. It seems to have been the language of the upper classes in Jerusalem; and,

· A proto-Mishnaic form of Hebrew was probably spoken, along with Aramaic in some areas of Judea between Lod and Jericho;, and

· Late Biblical Hebrew which was a literary language, along side Greek and Aramaic for the Jewish population. There were no speakers of this artificial tongue. This is not dissimilar to the situation of Modern Literary Arabic today or Church Latin in the middle ages.


Spoken Hebrew underwent great changes of three kinds:

· Natural developments internal to the language (see Segal, Kutscher, Bendavid);

· A mixing of dialects due to the political upheavals, exile etc.; and

· The profound influence of Aramaic in vocabulary, semantics and grammar including inflection.


Christian scholars have, at times, claimed that Hebrew was completely replaced by Aramaic during this period. However, Segal, Greenfield and Levine have demonstrated that this was not the case. Modern linguistic study, research on contemporary sources, the Bar Kochba letters in a popular spoken Hebrew all show that Hebrew was a spoken language of southern Palestine until at least 135 CE when, in the wake of the Bar Kochba rebellion, the Romans evicted or killed the Jewish population in the areas in which Hebrew was still spoken. At that point, Aramaic and Greek became virtually the only spoken languages of the whole of what is now Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. An early form of Arabic was already spoken on the desert fringes of this area.

T he Roman suppression of the first Jewish revolt against Rome (67-70 CE), including the destruction of Jerusalem led to a social-cultural-religious collapse. This included the disappearance of the priestly aristocracy and Jewish groups such as the Sadducees and Essenes. The earliest Rabbinic literature dates from the period 70-200 CE and it is written in the spoken Hebrew of the time, called, after the most famous literary product of the time, Mishnaic Hebrew.

HH: Here are the sources he gives:

Grammar of Mishnaic Hebrew by M. H. Segal, Oxford 1958, Paperback 1980

The Languages of Palestine, 200 B.C.E.-200 C.E. by Jonas C. Greenfield in Al Kanfei Yonah: Collected Studies of Jonas C. Greenfield on Semitic Philology, ed. Shalom M.

Languages of Jerusalem in Levine, Lee I. Judaism and Hellenism in antiquity : conflict or confluence?, Hendrickson Publishers, 1998. Paul, Michael E. Stone, and Avital Pinnick. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2001.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard
From kwrandolph AT email.com Mon Oct 11 11:33:55 2004
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From: "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
To: "Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 10:32:55 -0500
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] GDD (was not: Self-mutilation)
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Harold:

I am not going to argue this point again, but unless there is radical new
evidence to the contrary, all the evidence, both historical and linguistic,
points to the fact that Aramaic was the main language of the Jews who
returned from Babylon and afterwards until Greek displaced it (at least in
the West). In fact, the more I look at it, the stonger the evidence appears.

We have a clear example in the use of Latin: until a few centuries ago, it
was the main language of the educated, and often not so educated, people,
though not their mother tongues. They not only read and wrote in it, but they
even spoke it. High literature, diplomatic, government and business
documents, and even love letters, were written in Latin long after Latin had
ceased to be used in the markets and at a mother's knee. It was, and in some
obscure corners still is, a living, breathing language. And as a living,
breathing language, it has continued to develop and adjust to changing
circumstances, so that the Latin of today is not the same as the Latin of
1500, which was not the same as 1000, and so forth. Modern Latin is a
development of the spoken Latin of almost two millennia ago, it is not an
invention.

I have no problem viewing post-Esilic Hebrew as post-Exilic Jewish Latin. As
such, one cannot rule out the possibility that GDD in the Damascus Document
as an Aramaic loan word or backwards development from a noun.

GDD is a Biblical Hebrew word. Except for one disputed use, it was always
used for incising or cutting out. As a noun in the military, it was used for
a division (note: even the English term has the root meaning of cutting out).
Even in the disputed use, GDD referring to incising or cutting out
(scarification) makes perfect sense as an example of metaphoric, indirect
speech, fitting both the immediate context as well as a common, prophetic
image. Therefore, there is no reason to assume a different definition in
Biblical Hebrew for GDD other than that one. A second therefore, GDD in the
Damascus Document is most likely either an Aramaic loan word (the same way as
GZR in Esther 2:1) or a backwards development from a noun.

As I stated before, when I research the definition of a lexeme and find that the majority of
uses, like 90% or thereabouts, clearly have one definition but a few seem to have a different
one, I then look at those outlyers and ask "Have I understood all the other terms in the
context correctly?" "Is this an example of metaphoric or indirect speech?", only
after ruling out misunderstanding or metaphoric use do I look at having a different definition.

I don’t understand why you put so much effort to defend a dictionary
definition when the evidence for it is weak, at best.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Harold R. Holmyard III" <hholmyard AT ont.com>

Dear Karl,

> 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.



Yours,
Harold Holmyard
--
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