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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: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 14:53:55 -0500

Dear Karl,

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.

HH: But you are depending on that idea for your position, and the odds seems against it. And did you see the posts to Dave showing that scholars have concluded that Hebrew remained a spoken language into the second century A.D. at least?

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.

HH: I wanted to make sure you had all the information I could give you so that you could make an informed decision. You reject lexicons, but the translations also see a GDD meaning "band together."

NASB Jer 5:7: "Why should I pardon you? Your sons have forsaken Me And sworn by those who are not R235 gods. When I had fed them to the full, They committed adultery And trooped to the harlot's house.

NRSV Jer 5:7: How can I pardon you? Your children have forsaken me, and have sworn by those who are no gods. When I fed them to the full, they committed adultery and trooped to the houses of prostitutes.

NIV Jer 5:7: "Why should I forgive you? Your children have forsaken me and sworn by gods that are not gods. I supplied all their needs, yet they committed adultery and thronged to the houses of prostitutes.

NLT: "How can I pardon you? For even your children have turned from me. They have sworn by gods that are not gods at all! I fed my people until they were fully satisfied. But they thanked me by committing adultery and lining up at the city's brothels.

NKJV: "How shall I pardon you for this? Your children have forsaken Me And sworn by those that are not gods. When I had fed them to the full, Then they committed adultery And assembled themselves by troops in the harlots' houses.

KJV: Jer. 5:7 How shall I pardon thee for this? thy children have forsaken me, and sworn by them that are no gods: when I had fed them to the full, they then committed adultery, and assembled themselves by troops in the harlots' houses.

Good News: The Lord asked, "Why should I forgive the sins of my people? They have abandoned me and have worshiped gods that are not real. I fed my people until they were full, but they committed adultery and spent their time with prostitutes.

NAB: Why should I pardon you these things? Your sons have forsaken me, they swear by gods that are not. I fed them, but they committed adultery; to the harlot's house they throng.

Douay-Rheims: How can I be merciful to thee? thy children have forsaken me, and swear by them that are not gods: I fed them to the full, and they committed adultery, and rioted in the harlot's house.

HH: The HCSB takes a position with the idea of "gash themselves," but I think they're wrong:

7 Why should I forgive you? Your children have abandoned Me and sworn by those who are not gods.[1] I satisfied their needs, yet they committed adultery; they gashed themselves[2] at the prostitute's house.

HH: The outstanding commentator Keil in the 1800's understood the verb to imply that they "crowd into the house of the harlot, i.e. go thither in crowds." He takes it as "carnal uncleanness" according to 5:8b:

Jer. 5:8 They were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after his neighbour's wife.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard
From dwashbur AT nyx.net Mon Oct 11 16:19:31 2004
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From: Dave Washburn <dwashbur AT nyx.net>
To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] GDD (was not: Self-mutilation)
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 14:19:27 -0600
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Harold,
I am not interested in lists of scholar names, I thought I already mentioned that. The question, once again, is WHY were certain of the BK letters in Hebrew, WHY were some in Aramaic and some in Greek, etc.? I have already answered all of this and shown the religious nature of his occasional use of Hebrew, and all you are doing is throwing more "experts" at me. I really don't care what this or that expert says, I'm interested in the primary sources, the raw data. At this point, I see a movement within Hebrew scholarship, one that actually seems to have peaked about 20 years ago and then declined, that sought to show that Hebrew was a street language alongside Aramaic and Greek, and proceeded to grab onto any and every source that had an occasional Hebrew paragraph or clause in it, and say "See? That proves it." But all of the evidence so used is religious in nature: DSS, ossuaries, coins, certain letters from the failed rebellion of the second century; this rebellion, as one of your own experts already said, sought a return to the good ol' days when people spoke Hebrew and tried to force it onto the populace. It didn't work. The rebellion itself didn't work, the linguistic push didn't work. The whole idea that Hebrew was a commonly-spoken language and not the "Latin" of the time (thank you, Karl, that's a great analogy!) doesn't work. It requires too much manipulation of certain evidence and exclusion of other evidence. You can rattle off names and scholar citations all you want, but it's really not going to get you anywhere. If you want to press this issue, I suggest you pull out a couple of those letters and cite them and let's talk about the evidence, not some general statement by this or that "expert."

On Sunday 10 October 2004 17:41, Harold R. Holmyard III wrote:
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
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--
Dave Washburn
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"No good. Hit on head." -Gronk




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