Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

I will group a couple of resonses here, first Karl, then David,

vayyixtov Karl
> the fact that both Ezra and Daniel expected their readers to know Aramaic
> and the simpler literary style of the post Babylonian Exile Hebrew

what is 'simpler' and just how much simpler is it?
Does it correspond to Mishnaic Hebrew? How often? When/why?
The structure of Esther shows a good control of classical Hebrew.
Yes, I can point to LBH features in the text, (e.g. vanahafox hu 9:1, [a qatol
anoxi structure more common in LBH and Qumran and Phoenician but
not in Aramaic, nor even in mishnaic Hebrew], and leqayyem) but
I would not characterize the book as a 'simple literary style'.

> writings, are indicators that Aramaic, not Hebrew, was the language of the
> street and home. These are clues just from the Bible itself.>

This overlooks nature of the texts themselves. The Aramaic of Ezra and
Daniel is is used for Babl. court scenes and international correspondence.
In addition it is literary. Notice the word order. In the west before
the Exile the
basic Aramaic word order had been a restrictive (Pn) V-S-O (where Pn is
one or more fronted element), usually with only one fronted element, if any.
And after the spread of Greek and relaxing of Official Aramaic the word
order in the west was again a restrictive (Pn) V-S-O, from Qumran thru
Talmudic. But Daniel, Ezra, and Official Aramaic show a very free word
order with frequent multiple frontings. I conclude that Daniel and Ezra and
not written in the language of the street but in a literary Aramaic 
appropriate
to the subject matter. They certainly do not give us how the people in the
villages of Judea were speaking. They do attest to multilingualism. But
that is a whole different ballgame. As long as a significant number of
Hebrew speakers could understand literary Aramaic, the writings make
sense sociolinguistically. Please note, this does not prove that there
were mother-tongue Hebrew speakers, it simply undermines the claim
that this is testimony of the 'home language'.
...
>> 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 it was the scholarly adept who wrote mishnaic Hebrew, the opposite
of your theory.

>But without clear historical references, both sides are speculating.

Those that have taken the view that you just mentioned and looked at the
texts themselves have come to a conclusion that the thesis is invalid and
cannot explain the breadth of evidence. It is not speculation, unless you
want to take a position that all history is 'speculation'. Historical research
is weighted probability.
It would be nice to know that someone who brushes
this research aside as 'speculation' has actually read or studied the
material, including, for example abba bendavid's 80 pages in leshon
miqra ulshon Haxamim (approx pp. 80-160), or Kutscher's articles on the
barkochba letters (Aramaic and Hebrew), or his introduction to the Isaiah
scroll. Or Jozef Milik in Tens Years After, concluding that Segal, Klausner,
Epstein, and others were right after all, and that the BarKochba letters
(for Milik) put a final seal on the picture. Maybe it's speculaton to call
all this research 'speculation'?

>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?

Again, the result of 100 years of mishnaic scholarship has led to a consensus
that the thesis that it "was [not] spoken as a native language spoken in the
home and market, [and] was only a learned language for religion, legal and
high literature, like medieval Latin," cannot explain the data and must be
rejected as false.
And since this language was in existence at the same time as (canonical)
Biblical Hebrew was being written, and presumably known and used by the
writers themselves, it is intergrally related to biblical Hebrew. Most would
see Qohelet as a part of a proto mishnaic Hebrew. And it certainly needs
to be compared and contrasted with any "simpler literary style" of Second
Temple BH that you mentioned above.

vayyixtov David
>> so what do we find at Qumran? Two copies of Aramaic Job, and a
>> snippet from
>> Lev 16 that may or may not refer to a targum of the whole book.
>
>Do you have a different hypothesis about what it was?  As far as I know, 
>it's commonly
>accepted among Qumran scholars that it was a fragment of a Targum of 
>Leviticus.

Yes, it may have been from a book of Leviticus, or it may have been from a
reading for the Day of Atonement (Lev 16) and part of another work. If we had
other targumim besides Job, this would be an easier call. But all by itself,
it remains difficult to characterize, especially after the long Job ms has
eastern links. We just don't know about this Leviticus fragment. And it sits
like an orphan.

>> And the long Job targum shows features of having been imported from the
>> East.
>
> What exactly are these "features"?

Wish I could remember them and citations, so rather than misquote something--
See T. Muraoka, 1974, The Aramaic of the Old Targum of Job from Qumran
Cave XI" JSS 25: 425-43 on this manuscript. Ed Cook "Qumran Aramaic and
Aramaic Dialectology" Studies in Qumran Aramic, Suppl 3., ed T. Muraoka,
1992:1-21. cook reviewed the evidence and showed that much of it was based
on spelling rather than language structure (syntax/morphl) so that 11Q Job is
not very valuable for his purpose of tracing dialect bands accross the Middle
East, but that still leaves the Eastern provinence of this Job edition
intact, even
if recopied at Qumran preserving Eastern spellings.
...
>> And it appears that a targum of Job circulated in antiquity that
>> was
>> popular all over the Jewish world, with two copies turning up in our
>> Qumran
>> mss. there was good reason for this world-wide popularity of a Job
>> targum. The Hebrew text has singular dialectical difficulties.
>
>I'm still not sure what your point is.

The point is that we do not have strong evidence for an Aramaic Bible in the
West at this time. We have a coincidence of Alexandria (LXX), two rabbinic
stories, and two Qumran texts all testifying to the use of an Aramaic Job.
Five ancient testimonies to a Targum of Job, pretty amazing. When it rains
it pours.
And then virtually nothing,
except for 8 verses from Leviticus 16 (which is interesting
in its own right because of traditions of special readings on yom
ha-kippurim mYoma 7:1). With hundreds of biblical Hebrew texts and a
significant number of Greek Bible texts, the lack of general Aramaic Bible
texts is an enigma. My point is that the lack of targumim at Qumran are
problematic for a view that the targum was in use and circulation in Judea
in the first century. Proof that a targum was not there or in use? No. But
Job is special enough, and the other manuscripts of Hebrew and Greek
Bible are numerous enough to make it doubtful that targumim were in
general use in Judea in the first century. Is it a leap to call this doubtful?
For me the bigger leap is to jump from virtual silence to claim that Qumran
establishes the use of the targum. (I'm not saying that you claim this, just
that many claim this.) The character of Job, and the virtual lack of targum
leave probability on the side of no widespread, general use of targum in
Judea in the first century.
And while not proof, it is an interesting lack of prediction of the Geiger
hypothesis (which was disproved on other grounds). That is, the Geiger
hypothesis would predict that if thousands of pieces of Bibles
in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek were discoverd in first century Judea, one
would find popular, numerous, Aramaic evidence. We don't. What we
have is a general lack of Targum. The silence is loud enough to have a
voice, even if not decisive.

--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
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