Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

For James and Karl,
sorry for the delay this sat in my 'draft' box a couple of days

vayyixtov James
>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.>

rabbinic debates were in progress long before 70 CE, and the Mishna
records many statements or discussions from the zugot up to Hillel and
Shammai, as well as tannaim like Yochanan ben Zakkai (70CE).

>
>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?>

Mishnaic Hebrew can be used in more than one way, of course, though
generically it refers to the colloquial Hebrew from the Second Temple
thru 200CE (sometimes called MH 1) and then 200-700 CE (sometimes
called MH 2). As I explained offlist, we have many documents and graffiti
from the Second Temple period that are normally classified as either
mishnaic Hebrew, or proto-mishnaic Hebrew. If it isn't classified as
literary Hebrew then it normally is classified as 'mishnaic'. It all depends
on the level of precision being intended. I would call Qohelet and
4QMMT two different dialects of proto-mishnaic Hebrew on the one
hand, or simply 'mishnaic Hebrew' when speaking broadly. The
Bar Kochba period (130-135CE) documents are normally called
mishnaic Hebrew, those these, too, can be further specified since they
are non-rabbinic and with a few distinctives of their own.

     LIke writing:
"I call upon myself heaven as witness'
me`id and `ali ta-shamayim ... (from a BarKochba letter)
מעיד אני עלי תשמים

or 'that I put/give chains on your legs
    like I did to . . .'
she-ani noten ta-kkvalim
    beraglexem kema she-`asiti
שאני נתן תכבלים ברגלכם
      כמה שעסתי . . . ל

or 'fortify the place'
Hazzeq ta-mmaqom  ... (from a BarKochba letter)
חזק תמקום

How do you like them apples? (Bryant will be happy.)
(Incidentally, people in Israel today naturally talk like this
but everyone is trained to write "et" את after their first two
weeks of learning to write.
The above examples are obviously something that was not learned
in school, nor from Aramaic. It is an isograph with Punic, but these are
hardly to be explained as Punic speakers writing Mishnaic Hebrew.
(it sometimes seems, forgive me for the impression, that statements
get proposed on this list 'contra mishnaic', no matter how improbable.
So I've preempted a Punic theory.)
These were mishnaic Hebrew speakers writing mishnaic Hebrew.

vayyixtov Karl
> I stated before I never studied Mishnaic Hebrew and don’t know it. As far as
people being mother-tongue speakers of it, all we have are clues which
different people interpret differently.

All 'opinions' are not equal or even viable.
I prefer interpretations from those with a deep acquaintance with the data.

>As far as I have been told, there is
no document that definitely states that Mishnaic Hebrew was spoken as a
mother-tongue, nor one that denies it. Hence my statement that we are
speculating.>

Maybe you haven't recognized it when you've heard/seen it.
We don't have any records that definitely state that biblical Hebrew was the
mothertongue of anyone either, though we do have one incident where
the subjects of Hezekiah were said not to know Aramaic but to know
Hebrew.

On the other hand we actually do have statements about Judea and Hebrew.
The letter of Aristeas (2c BCE) says that the people of Judea "do not speak
Aramaic, as is commonly supposed, but a different language"
(Aristeas11-12). This is understandable, because Egyptians would be able
to do business with Judea in Aramaic, but now Aristeas informs them that
Judea's own language was different and was needed for translating the torah
into Greek. It was Hebrew.
You are free to doubt the author, but that is what he said.
Matthew Black AAAG quoted this and missed the point,
making the ridiculous claim that the author was referring to two dialects
of Aramaic. Why is Black's reading ridiculous? Because it was a language
related to Torah (Hebrew), and the Greek itself used ETERA rather than
ALLH to refer to the language. Some over here, when they've seen Black's
quote, just chuckle and roll their eyes,
but NT scholarship doesn't seem to blink. An accurate scholar
could have disagreed and said that the author mistakenly attributed
the language of the Torah to the current language of Judea. After all,
that can be done to anyone's testimony. It can be challenged.

So you asked for such testimony and now you have it. Aristeas.

A second witness:
Josephus, War 5:272 refers to watchers on the wall calling to the city
below whenever a stone missle was incoming, IN THE PATRIARCHAL
LANGUAGE. (Yes, Josephus knew the difference between Aramaic and
Hebrew. When he says SABBATA means 'rest' in Hebrew he was correct
and those who have called him wrong -- are themselves wrong.
Aramaic for 'rest' is naH yanuH. Shavat is Hebrew.)
So what did he say they said from the wall (66-70 CE)?    Josephus
said the Greek would be 'the son is coming'. This can only be explained
as Hebrew 'ben baa (which results from saying 'a stone is coming', fast,
in Hebrew, eben baa, not Aramaic. eben ata vs. bar ate ). Josephus goes
on to relate how the people would take cover and escape injury.
The patriarchal language being used from the wall to shout warnings to a
public below. (note: whether Josephus is a bad writer for using an implicit
pun is irrelevant to the incidental linguistic data that he thereby provides.)
Josephus testifies to the patriarchal language being in use and gives a
datum that further clarifies that Hebrew was uniquely in view.

One could even extrapolate from this that Josephus viewed literary/
biblical Hebrew and mishnaic Hebrew as one language. Guards and
the people in the street are not speaking literary Hebrew, yet their
colloquial is called 'the patriarchal language'.

> I would put Job as late pre-Babylonian Exile from the literary
style. Once one recognizes the style, he is only middling difficult to read
and well within the mainstream Biblical Hebrew.>

Are we reading the same text?
I think I'll follow Avi Hurvitz on this one. :-)
[ framework story is LBHn LateBiblicalHebrew,
poetry is dialectically strange.]

>But in books written after the Exile, I find a noticeably greater percentage
of simple, declarative statements with a smaller vocabulary. Also the
sentence structure tends to be simpler. There appears to be deliberate
archaicising, i.e. copying the style of Torah instead of a continuation of
the styles of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. I haven’t made a formal study on this,
just something that I noticed while reading.>

Again, I side with those with more study on the matter. It certainly doesn't
line up with my own re-readings, nor with my studies, published or private.
Esther is good literary and Mishnaic Hebrew is vocabulary rich, so much
so, that there are records of Aramaic glosses to these around 3c CE
(after mishnaic was no longer a colloquial).

>> Does it correspond to Mishnaic Hebrew? How often? When/why?
>
> Don’t know Mishnaic Hebrew, therefore can’t answer these.

But you are quick to assure us that opinions are just "speculation versus
speculation"?
>From my perspective a person shouldn't be making stylistic observations
and their relationship to language data that they haven't read.

>> 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.
>
> You missed the point.

Did I?

> The question is not the type of Aramaic used, rather
that such extensive sections were in Aramaic in the first place. That shows
that Daniel and Ezra expected that their readers would know and understand
Aramaic. Particularly in the case of Ezra: if he lived in a society where
Hebrew was the mother-tongue, then he could not make the expectation that
his readers could read the Aramaic correspondence. >

Why couldn't he expect Hebrew speakers to be able to read Aramaic?
If he lived in a mother-tongue Hebrew society where the
international language was Aramaic he could expect to write such a
work. It's actually lived out similarly in two-thirds of the world today.

In Ezra's day the language of the government and international business was
Aramaic, why wouldn't he expect most people to follow? When I lived in
multilingual settings in Africa it was no big deal to hear people
switch through
three different languages in a speech (tribal language, larger trade language,
language of international education) One might even wonder if that model
would apply to Judea: Hebrew tribal language, Aramaic wider trade language,
Greek language of international education. What do you know? It just
might fit!
A trilingual Judea in second half of Second Temple.

. . .
>> 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.
>
>What data? The only data I have seen is also consistent with the “like
medieval Latin” understanding.
“‘Consensus’ is the refuge of scoundrels” shows how much I am impressed by a
consensus. Now I am not calling *you* a ‘scoundrel’ by that quote above, I
am just quoting others to indicate how much ‘consensus’ impresses me.>

the problem is that there is so much data
that quoting on this list would be 'formidable'.
1. It would take too much time to gather and write. 2. it's already been
published, and 3. it requires good language skills to perceive, appreciate,
and to hold the 'whole' together for reaching conclusions that are viable.

Since by your own admission you don't control  mishnaic
Hebrew nor modern Hebrew,
the most direct method is to cite specialists. Within mishanic Hebrew
studies, the medieval Latin theory applied to the Second Temple for
mishnaic Hebrew, is something like 'pre-germ theory' within medicine.

And within sociolinguistic studies, I've never heard of developing two
distinctly different, non-colloquial registers of a non-colloquial language.
It would be interesting to look at alleged exceptions.
This is one of the places your 'medieval Latin' theory breaks down. The reason
that there was standard Latin and vulgar Latin was because people were
writing 'standard Latin' and speaking a colloquial vulgar. Eventually the
vulgar was so vulgar that they started calling it by different dialect names.
(French, Spanish, et al.) The Spanish, of course, did not invent vulgar
Latin, they WERE vulgar Latin.

So you are free to remain skeptical.
And if you are not really interested in mishnaic Hebrew or its
relationship to literary Hebrew, (a.k.a. 'biblical', LBH; BenSira is
'non-biblical' but 'literary', because it didn't make the canon)
our discussion has probably reached a point where it needs to end.

Hopefully, others reading this list will plan to train themselves up to
handle the issues. This can be quite engaging and informative.
They will be rewarded.
heve shalom

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