Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 2/4/06, Peter Kirk wrote:
> On 04/02/2006 20:01, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:

> The kinds of spelling change I have in mind are use of more matres
> lectionis. A trend towards full rather than defective holam and hiriq is
> clearly visible from inscriptional Hebrew to late biblical Hebrew, with
> the Torah somewhere in between. This change probably does not reflect an
> actual change in the language, but only a desire to clarify and
> disambiguate the pronunciation. There may have been sound changes as
> well, but there is no evidence that there was. These are just spelling
> conventions, not indications of language change. So I repeat that there
> is no evidence that the language of the Torah is different from
> pre-exilic Hebrew.

There are of course various issues including how well the written spelling
reflects the pronounciation.  The update in spelling may have been part
of a process by which first the sound changes took effect and then
decades or centuries later, the changes were reflected in the spelling.
At the same time, both sound changes and spelling changes were
ongoing processes in the spoken and written languages.

Nevertheless, a change from mostly a use of -h at the end of the word
to reflect masculine possessive to a -w at the end does reflect a
sound change, whether it happened earlier or concurrently.  And a
change from -m to -ym possibly reflects a lengthening of the final
vowel in the masculine.

All this is evidence that there may very well have been sound changes
-- both in vowels and consonants -- that were reflected in the
"modernized" spelling of the Torah.  The spelling of the Torah may
reflect a modernized spelling or it may reflect the spelling convention
of a secretive scribal school in official Jerusalem circles that did not
deal with inscriptions and is therefore uknown from the inscriptional
evidence.

The question whether or not "Biblical Hebrew" (ie, consonantal spelling)
was spoken in pre-exilic times is a controversial and clearly not
something everyone agrees about.  The possibility of "Biblical Hebrew"
representing a stage in post-exilic times is still very probably (given
that the other scenario -- secret otherwise unknown official scribal
school -- is unlikely).

Yitzhak Sapir