Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

Karl Randolph wrote:
> On the Ugaritic, I'll have to double check.  The last source I read 
> indicated that its surviving texts were from about the same time 
> as Raamses II the Great or later, which was centuries after Moses 
> wrote Torah (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit ). Apparently 
> there's some disagreement?

This has nothing to do with the discussion.   However, in a prior
discussion you stated, "As for when Moses lived, that is still 
inexactly known. Corrolating ancient dates to our modern calandar
is an inexact art, true dates may be off by a century or more. From 
different sources, I have seen dates for Nehemiah's rebuilding of 
Jerusalem's walls from 390 - 440 BC, so how close are our guesses 
for Moses' life's dates? We aren't told how much time there was from
year zero of our calandar to those events. Add to that copyest errors, 
an exact chronology is cannot be made, to say the least."  So now
you have new evidence that leads you to date Moses prior to 
Ugarit?  Could you elaborate?

Of course, you'd also have to show that the people in Moses' time, 
whenever that was, spoke Biblical Hebrew, and not, for example, 
a form of Canaanite not unlike Ugaritic.  The Siloam inscription is
evidence in the sense that it shows that the Biblical Hebrew
represents a language that was spoken around Hezekiah's time.

> I already wrote that the only evidence I have is the internal dates 
> indicated in the documents themselves.

I think you are getting carried away.  We are not discussing the
Torah here.  We are discussing linguistics, and the analysis of
Proto-Semitic.  You have departed from the consensus in saying
that Hebrew did not derive from a language having additional
phonemes for Ayin and Het.  What do internal dates in the
documents have to do with that?  No matter if Moses did or did
not receive the Torah, and no matter if you date Moses early or
late, Hebrew could still be a language that originally had
multiple Het and Ayin phonemes.  Actually, I think it's been
argued that the LXX transliteration of certain words (such as 
Gaza) reflects the multiple phonemes that the Ayin had.

Yitzhak Sapir