Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Reinhard G. Lehmann" <lehmann AT uni-mainz.de>]

b-hebrew-request AT lists.ibiblio.org schrieb:
> William Sanford LaSor's "Handbook of Biblical Hebrew, vol.1(Grand Rapids: 
> Errdmans, 1978, p.3:
>
> "All learning is in context. The context, however, is not artificial, composed 
> perchance by one who does not use the language naturally, but rather it is the actual 
> language of those who used it as their mother-tongue. For this reason, I refuse to ask 
> students to compose sentences in Hebrew. To do so is to impress errors on the student's 
> mind. And, frankly, most of us who teach Biblical hebrew do not have sufficient fluency 
> in the language to speak or write it."
>   
He ist absolutely right. We are to perceive Ancient Hebrew as a 
historical language - avtually there is no contemporary speaker of that 
language anymore. And as far as BIBLICAL Hebrew is concerned it is 
important to keep in mind that it is an artificial language, mixing up 
several synchronic and diachronic different layers (registers, dialects 
and so on). So, what is BIBLICAL Hebrew to speak? See, for instance, 
Edward Ullendorf's important studies "Is Biblical Hebrew a language?" 
and other papers in his: Is Biblical Hebrew a language?, Wiesbaden 1977, 
and, more recently, E.A.Knauf, War "Biblisch-hebräisch" eine Sprache? 
Empirische Gesichtspunkte zur linguistischen Annäherung an die Sprache 
der althebräischen Literatur: ZAH 3 (1990) 11-23.
Because there is no one to speak to who has a native speaker's 
competence in Biblical Hebrew, there is neither a sound reason to 
translate a paragraph of any language into Biblical Hebrew nor a chance 
to learn anything from that lest that we are ignorant.

Reinhard G. Lehmann
Academical Director
Forschungsstelle für althebräische Sprache
Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz