Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear James,

I have not followed this discussion, but after reading your post 
today I have a few comments.
Mishnaic Hebrew is found in the Mishnah, whose redaction occurred 
around 250 C.E. A language will change through time, but the language 
of the books of the Tanakh is remarkably uniform, given that the 
books were written over a long period of time. Even the so-called 
Late biblical Hebrew is very similar to the supposed previous stages 
of the language. In connection with my doctoral dissertation I made a 
careful study of all the finite and infinite verbs in the books 
supposed to contain LBH, and I found absolutely no differences in the 
*meaning* of these verbs compared with that of the supposed older 
books. But there are of course some other newer traits.

The language of the Mishnah, however, is quite different from that of 
the Tanakh. Particularly is that the case in connection with the 
verbal system. In MH the consecutive forms are not extant, and while 
I will say that BH is an aspect language where the temporal reference 
must be construed on the basis of the context, MH is a tense 
language, just as Modern Hebrew. The meaning of some of the stems 
have also changed compared with BH, and new stems such as 
Nithpael/Nithpoel and Saphel/Shaphel (from Aramaic) are found. There 
are also differences regarding the expression of the genitive and the 
construction of dependent clauses. Because of the great differences, 
quite a lot of time must have elapsed from the period when BH was 
spoken until the fully-fledged MH was spoken. In Oslo the students 
first have studied BH, and then they start with MH. There are so many 
similarities between BH and MH, as far as the vocabulary is 
concerned, that the students have few problems in reading MH, once 
they are taught the syntactic differences. However, all the Aramaic 
words and clauses found in the Mishnah give the students some 
problems.

Apart from the DSS, we have few documents from B.C.E. (Ben Sira and 
the Hebrew inscriptions, though). But if we study the small 
differences between the Great Isaiah scroll from Qumran and the 
Masoretic text, there is good evidence that the kind of Hebrew known 
by the Qumran community was different from that of BH. There is 
absolutely no evidence that Hebrew ceased to be spoken in the B.C.E., 
and similarly, there is no reason to take the references to the 
Hebrew language in the NT (hEBRAIS DIALEKTOS, Acts 21:40) to refer to 
anything but real Hebrew. If this was MH or something resembling MH 
we do not know. But the great difference between BH and MH regarding 
syntax and other matters suggest that the origin of the language that 
later became  MH goes back to B.C.E. A description of MH is found in 
M. H. Segal "A Grammar of Mishnaic Hebrew".


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo

> Hi,
>
> recent discussions have caused me a lot of confusion. There have been 
> a lot of references to 'Mishnaic Hebrew' with no-one actually 
> providing a definition of the term. My logical assumption was that 
> people were talking about the Hebrew of the Mishnah which summarises 
> Rabbinic debates from 70-200 i.e. a period which is post second temple 
> period. However, the term has been used in debates to refer to Hebrew 
> of the second temple period. This is quite confusing.
>
> While we can look to MSS of the Mishnah to understand the Hebrew used 
> to compose it is there anything at all written in Hebrew from the 
> second temple period that we can use to define the form of second 
> temple period Hebrew?
>
> James Christian
>
> --
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
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