Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Peter:

On 1/9/07, Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org> wrote:
> On 09/01/2007 18:47, K Randolph wrote:
> > ...
> > You can ignore me, that's no problem. But why were those others
> > "disproved"? Was it on the basis of theory, or new observation? ...
>
> Ask Yitzhak, it was he who mentioned this. Actually he provided (on 3rd
> January) some quotes in German, which I think you understand if he
> doesn't. Here again is the relevant quote from Noldeke, 1873, as given
> by Yitzhak:
> > Aber entscheidend ist fu:r die Urspru:nglichkeit des $ die Thatsache,
> > dass dasselbe im Arabischen ganz anders reflectirt wird als &; jenes
> > na:mlich durch [Arabic Shin], dieses durch [Arabic sin] oder [Arabic
> > tha].  Mithin ist anzuerkennen, dass die alten Hebra:er mit ihrem #
> > zwei a:hnliche Laute ausdru:ckten, von denen aber der eine mit der
> > Zeit ganz den Laut des [Samekh] annahm.
> >
>
> But you would do better to re-read that post of Yitzhak's.
Upon rereading his original post, this time more carefully, he was
quoting from someone who disputes the theory that the sin / shin split
was an Aramatization of Hebrew pronunciation that occurred in the post
Babylonian Captivity period. However, in order to dispute it, the
author needed to mention that the theory exists and that there are
scholars who accept it. The basis for his dispute is that he takes as
a given that Hebrew always had multiple sounds for some letters, a
given which I say cannot be taken.

(I originally just skimmed the quote, as it used a transliteration
scheme for German I had never before seen, and so I am not used to
it.)

> > ... The
> > amount of new discoveries from known Biblical Hebrew in the last
> > century is miniscule, so what was it? For all intents and purposes, we
> > all are working from the same data.
> >
> What, the DSS are minuscule? And the evidence from Ugarit? And many
> other smaller finds? In fact Noldeke's argument goes back to 1873 which
> puts it before the discoveries of the Amarna letters and the Cairo
> geniza as well. So there is plenty of new data to consider.
The DSS are post when that change would already have occurred and
Ugarit is not Hebrew, nor the Amarna letters, and if the DSS are post
event, the Cairo Geniza even more so.

The only "evidence" that I know of that contradicts the teaching that
Hebrew had ceased to be the language learned at one's mother's knee
within a couple of generations of the Babylonian Captivity is the
Documentary Hypothesis, which I think is a bunch of hooey. Not worth
the paper it is written on. If one ignores the Documentary Hypothesis,
then the patterns of language use already in Tanakh give indications
that post Babylonian Captivity, Hebrew for all practical
considerations, had ceased to be the language spoken at the hearth and
market, though still spoken as the language of literature, religion
and government, thus it is very unlikely that its pronunciation had
not been changed to conform to the pronunciation of the same letters
in the Aramaic of that time. That would include making a sin / shin
split where none had existed before.

Thus the DSS were written after when Aramaic already had influenced
the pronunciation of Hebrew, the same with the Cairo Geniza, and so
they would reflect the Aramaicized pronunciation of their time, not
the Hebrew pronunciation of the native speaker.

Once you have removed the non-Hebrew and post Biblical period sources,
you are left with a miniscule of new discoveries in the past century.

> --
> Peter Kirk
> E-mail:  peter AT qaya.org
> Blog:    http://speakertruth.blogspot.com/
> Website: http://www.qaya.org/
Karl W. Randolph.