Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Randall:

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>wrote:

>
> On Geiger: one must remember the whole picture. He also said:
> "Hebrew ceased to be a living language; nevertheless, it remained, like
> Latin
> in the Middle Ages, a religious language of scholars during the period of
> the
> Second Temple" And mishnaic scholarship today considers that mistaken.
>
> A turning point (not to mention immediate criticism during the 19th c) --
> "Segal’s celebrity is linked to his works on the Mishna: first of all
> an article
> which ...  by a rigorous demonstration showing that Mishnaic Hebrew had to
> be a vernacular;  . . .All the previous writers had built up their grammars
> on
> the linguistic differences between the two periods, connected solely from a
> diachronic point of view. Segal took a different approach. If Mishnaic
> Hebrew
> was a spoken language, if it represented a colloquial level of language,
> it would be natural for a large proportion of its vocabulary to be absent
> from Biblical texts.


When we look at the Biblical texts, we should expect that the spoken
language contained significant vocabulary not recorded in the Bible. One
reason is that there are vast areas of daily life simply not recorded in the
Bible. Almost nothing is mentioned about the production of cloth, for
example, so we are lacking the terminology that would have been daily speech
in Biblical times for that production. For example, the Gezar Calendar
mentions (CD P$T which from the context appears to refer to the retting of
flax, a practice nowhere mentioned in the Bible but known from other
sources.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that some seldom used terms were forgotten
before the translating of the LXX, as evidenced by the translators either
skipping those terms, and/or translating them a different way each time (if
used more than once) that term appeared in the Bible. To me, these, along
with the fact that both Ezra and Daniel expected their readers to know
Aramaic and the simpler literary style of the post Babylonian Exile Hebrew
writings, are indicators that Aramaic, not Hebrew, was the language of the
street and home. These are clues just from the Bible itself.

Therefore the claim from vocabulary is insufficient as counter-evidence.


> The relationship between the two corpora is no longer
> simply diachronic (as was said explicitly or implicitly by the authors in
> the
> earlier periods) but the two forms of Hebrew necessarily coexisted; thus
> there were not two successive states of the same language but rather two
> different synchronies, "
>
> That Mishnaic Hebrew had to be a natively-spoken dialect is not a
prerequisite for this situation. That some writers could make a close
approximation to Biblical style could be merely an indication of their
scholarly level, while those less scholarly adept followed the language as
it was spoken.

But without clear historical references, both sides are speculating.

>
> blessings
> --
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> randallbuth AT gmail.com
> Biblical Language Center
> Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life


Not only is this speculation, but it is speculation on a subject outside of
Biblical Hebrew. I know of no one who claims that Mishnaic Hebrew was not
spoken. Where the disagreement lies is in whether or not it was spoken as a
native language spoken in the home and market, or was it only a learned
language for religion, legal and high literature, like medieval Latin?

Karl W. Randolph.