Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

After giving this some thought, here is my 2¢.

1. a belief that non-spoken methods are more efficient.

Except for a deaf mute, I don’t think anyone ascribes to this reason.
For students who hear, it helps to have a pronunciation connected with
the symbols, both to help remember them, and to communicate with
others.

2. for practical reasons, a spoken BH class is not available for you.

When I attended classes years ago, this was the case.

3. a belief that BH is special/dead and shouldn't be spoken as a class 
language.

Biblical Hebrew hasn’t been spoken for two and a half millennia, so in
that case it is a “dead” language. So which pronunciation would one
use in class? Eastern European? Yemeni? Modern Israeli? Does it make a
difference?

Personally, I think that the Masoretic pronunciation reflects an
Aramaic corruption to the language, refined by centuries that had
minor influences of other languages as well, such as Greek. The
Yemenite Hebrew pronunciation reflects also southern Arabic influence.
And modern Israeli pronunciation, where is it from (rhetorical
question)?

So what was the “authentic” Biblical Hebrew pronunciation?

It is for this practical reason that I would not use Biblical Hebrew
as the main language in a teaching classroom.

On another issue:

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 7:01 AM, Tory Thorpe<torythrp AT yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Rolf,
>
> Thank you for the clarification. I agree that being fluent in any language 
> *can* be an obstacle to learning BH, but speakers of modern Hebrew can 
> actually study BH in Hebrew and the advantages that come along with that 
> are obvious.
>
> Tory Thorpe
>
When I was young, I wanted to study modern, Israeli Hebrew as well as
Arabic, Ugaritic, the whole scholarly tradition. Instead I found
myself isolated with only my Tanakh, concordance and dictionaries. The
disadvantage is that I am not familiar with scholarly tradition, even
some terminology. The advantage is that when I read the text, I can
react to it automatically, without having to sift through differing
meanings brought in by the differing languages.

I cannot read a modern, Israeli newspaper, I tried. Yiddish is much easier.

I suspect that the problems for a modern Israeli trying to read Tanakh
are similar to my problems trying to read KJV—it’s not the words that
have gone out of use that give the problems, rather those still in
use, but today have a different usage than they did 500 years ago. I
try to read the modern meanings back into the KJV and often the
results are gibberish. So in the same manner, the modern Israeli
thinks he understands the text, but what he often does is to read a
modern meaning back into the Tanakh, and he misunderstands the text.

Karl W. Randolph.