Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Martin Shields <enkidu AT bigpond.net.au>]

> > > We have to be wary of archaisms only in syntax, I think: usually,
> > > words and spelling can be "archaised" without errors, but syntax can
> > > never be "copied" without errors.
> > > It's an interesting problem. Are there some notorious passages in  
> > > the
> > > mentioned corpus where people say it is archaic artificially? I  
> > > admit
> > > I never really studied this.
> > > Regards
> > > Herman
> >
> > Hi Herman,
> >
> > But we expect that students can reproduce Hebrew in exams, esp. if we
> > test on English to Hebrew. Some bright students can get 100%, so how
> > about scribes etc?
>
> I guess there are bright people all over, David, but imagine you read
> a lot of Shakespeare and you decide to write some Shakespearean stuff
> of your own (a new composition). It's easy to reproduce the
> morphology, the spelling, the words, but it's very difficult to get
> the syntax perfect:
> In your fake Shakespeare text, certain structures will easily end up,
> that look perfect English, but further research shows it was unknown
> in Shakespeare's days.
> I don't say it's impossible, but it's near. I for myself could fake
> 17th century words and spelling, but I have no idea how the syntax
> really works in detail.
> best regards
> Herman

The parallel with Shakespeare doesn't work too well because for  
Shakespeare we have an extensive corpus of texts against which any  
text manufactured to look old can be measured. There is no such  
control set of texts for biblical Hebrew because we have little  
direct knowledge of the early history of the text and so any attempt  
to identify definitively a corpus of exclusively older Hebrew is  
plagued by the possibility (or perhaps probability) that the texts  
identified as old have either been updated or have themselves been  
manufactured to look old.

Regards,

Martin Shields,
Sydney, Australia.