Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Tory,

I agree that to be fluent in modern Hebrew is an advantage for 
classical Hebrew scholars, because then they can read the linguistic 
literature written in modern Hebrew (and they also have an advantage 
in connection with the Biblical Hebrew vocabulary).  But the same is 
true in connection with French and Italian; scholars being fluent in 
these languages can read the linguistic literature in these languages.

I have not said that being fluent in modern Hebrew *is* a serious 
disadvantage for those learning Biblical Hebrew, but in some cases it 
*can* be a disadvantage, as in the case of the two students I 
mentioned. Their problem was that that they thought in modern Hebrew, 
and therefore they automatically ascribed characteristics to biblical 
Hebrew that are foreign to that language. And they had difficulties 
in adjusting their mind set and ascertain that Biblical Hebrew is a 
different language compared with modern Hebrew.

Therefore I am a little skeptical about learning Biblical Hebrew in a 
spoken BH classroom. We do not know how Biblical Hebrew was spoken, 
or whether parts of the Tanakh contain a literary language that was 
not spoken by the ordinary people at the time the texts were made. I 
therefore surmise (but I may be wrong) that the Biblical Hebrew 
spoken in the classroom has modern Hebrew as its basis, and that 
because of this, modern ideas such as tense=grammaticalized location 
in time (which I claim is completely foreign to Biblical Hebrew) can 
be smuggled into Biblical Hebrew by help of the classroom Hebrew. 
Therefore, I asked Randall about the advantage of using classroom 
Biblical Hebrew.


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo



> --- On Sun, 6/14/09, Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no> wrote:
>
> >  Because of their modern Hebrew background, it was
> >  not as easy for them to learn Biblical Hebrew (the
> >  subtleties of the language)
>
> I would strongly disagree that modern Hebrew is any sort of obstacle 
> to learning BH. I may or may not be alone in the following opinion, 
> but Hebrew scholars who are not fluent in the modern Hebrew are at a 
> serious disadvantage in this field.
>
> Tory Thorpe
>
>
>      
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew