Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Moshe Shulman <mshulman AT ix.netcom.com>]

At 08:29 PM 6/14/2009, you wrote:
> There is a sense in which Biblical Hebrew is dead, just as Middle English or
> Old French or Koiné Greek are dead.  In that sense, pronunciation is not as
> significant a factor as it is for a living language.  It would not worry me
> whether a class in spoken BH followed the Massoretic pronunciation, or
> modern Israeli Hebrew, or one of the traditional schemes.  Given the
> closeness of modern Hebrew to BH, I can see arguments for following modern
> Hebrew phonology - more the eastern mizrahi variety than the popular as that
> would maintain more of the 'guttural' sounds.  As the development of the
> bgdkpt letters seems to be post-BH, whether they are distinguished or not is
> not essential.

I am not sure why you say that modern Hebrew is 
closer then Rabbinic Hebrew, which is still a 
living language in the sense that it is still 
used for the writing of books etc.

As to the pronunciation I agree that it would be 
difficult to say one is better then the other. (I 
don't know if you are aware of just how many 
different ways of pronouncing Hebrew there 
are.  It is a language that has had continual use 
for liturgical purposes going back to at least 
second temple times.) My pronunciation follows 
that used in certain areas of Eastern Europe and 
differs vastly from that of modern Israeli Hebrew.




> I believe one practical problem is that for those of us not actually
> involved in teaching Hebrew or studying it formally, time and money become a
> big issue.  Once you finish your undergraduate course, there is never enough
> time to do even the things you really want to do.
>
> Kevin Riley
>
> -------Original Message-------
>
> From: Randall Buth
> Date: 14/06/2009 10:26:48 PM
>
>
> A survey question.
>
> How many on this list are learning Biblical Hebrew in a spoken BH classroom?
>
>
> If not, is this because
>
> 1. A belief that non-spoken methods are more efficient.
>
> 2. For practical reasons, a spoken BH class is not available for you.
>
> 3. A belief that BH is special/dead and shouldn't be spoken as a class
> language.
>
> Thank you for your responses.
> Randall
>
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