Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 2/3/06, Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org> wrote:
> > No one agrees that "Biblical Hebrew" was spoken
> > before the Babylonian Exile.  Practically all philologists
> > agree that Biblical Hebrew as it is spelled today in the
> > Bible represents a stage not earlier than the Persian
> > period.  This means that any documents in an earlier
> > form of Hebrew were updated at least in spelling but
> > also possibly in vocabulary, sentence structure, we
> > don't know.  From the little inscriptions we have, it
> > appears that perhaps a very similar form of Hebrew
> > (what is known as  "Classical Hebrew" or "Standard
> > Hebrew") was being spoken 800 BCE - 600 BCE in
> > Judea.  That doesn't change the fact that "Biblical
> > Hebrew" if referencing the consonantal text only refers
> > to the Hebrew spoken in the Persian period.
> >
> >
> Well, we can only speculate about what was spoken. But if we look at the
> written consonantal text, we find very little difference (apart from
> letter shapes) between much of the biblical text (excluding the
> post-exilic "late biblical Hebrew" parts) and pre-exilic inscriptional
> Hebrew. There is simply not enough evidence that these were actually
> different languages, and so to make a hard distinction between
> pre-exilic and biblical Hebrew.

If we compare only the Torah and the pre-exilic material we still see some
consistent differences.  I had previously given the example of Qal present
participle in the plural masculine, ie, $om:rim which is consistently spelled
without either a waw or a yod in the word in the Siloam inscription
(consistently applies only to the waw unfortunately).  It is very hard for me
to search for this type of thing but definitely in the common case, the
spelling is later in the Torah, whether it was just composed later or
composed earlier but had its spelling "modernized."  Another example is
the -h possessive suffix for the masculine. I'm not saying these were
"different  languages."  But they weren't the same language at the
same point in time either.  And since here Biblical Hebrew is defined as
the consonantal text this places the text as post-exilic.

Yitzhak Sapir