Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Randall:

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 1:31 AM, Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com> wrote:

>  I would call Qohelet and
> 4QMMT two different dialects of proto-mishnaic Hebrew on the one
> hand, or simply 'mishnaic Hebrew' when speaking broadly.


You have made this statement a few times, and I am just now getting around
to calling you on it. Are you claiming that Qohelet is a document authored
during the second temple period?


> 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.
>
> From the history I was taught, Bar Kochba tried to have a revival of Hebrew
language in all areas of life. Yet the letters written to him were written
in Greek and Aramaic as well as Hebrew. One of the letters had the admission
that it was not written in Hebrew because no one in his group knew Hebrew.
That is evidence that Hebrew, even Mishnaic Hebrew, was a language of
religion, government, high literature but not of hearth and market. In other
words, its use was similar to that of medieval Latin.


> vayyixtov Karl
>
> 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.
>

So the context? Translation of official and religious documents? This
statement as you relate it to us could be used for a language that no one
spoke natively, but used in the same way as medieval Latin.


> 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,
>

Why bring in Black? He is irrelevant to this discussion.


> 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.


Again this is a statement that could be taken either way.


> 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'.
>
> There is no question of Josephus knowing the difference between Hebrew and
Aramaic, nor even of his conflating literary Hebrew with Mishnaic Hebrew.

That he should make specific mention of this can equally be understood as
evidence that Hebrew was not the language of market or hearth, but imposed
by a government dominated by religious elements.


> > 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?
>

No we’re not. You read it with the Masoretic points, I without.


> 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).
>
> Look back at what I wrote—I referred to the post Babylonian Exile Biblical
writings, not Mishnaic Hebrew. It is in those writings that I see clues that
Hebrew was not a mother-tongue, but a learned language for religious,
official government and high literature documents. And it is those clues
that I spelled out above.

>> 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.
>
> See above.


> >> 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?
>

Because pre-Babylonian Exile they couldn’t.


> If he lived in a mother-tongue Hebrew society where the
> international language was Aramaic he could expect to write such a
> work.


That was the situation during the time of King Hezekiah, yet the man on the
street knew only Hebrew. The high officials learned Aramaic, as well as the
international traders, but the farmers, shop keepers, craftsmen, even
peddlers, did not need to know anything other than Hebrew. And the text says
they didn’t.

Therefore, for Daniel to write original works in Aramaic, and Ezra to
include Aramaic correspondence and expect that the man on the street
understood it, indicates a linguistically changed society.


> 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.
>
> Look at your language in the above paragraphs, it is the language of
speculation, not proof.

Another thing, you are referring to the educated elite. To give an example,
I was in Hong Kong a few months ago. In the business and tourist areas,
local Chinese spoke Cantonese, Mandarin and English well. All three of them.
But go outside those areas, and the people speak only Cantonese, with maybe
a smattering of English and/or Mandarin. In fact, one shopkeeper cheerfully
admitted that if I was in her store, it was because I understand Cantonese,
therefore she did not need to speak anything other than Cantonese with me.

I have run into similar situations in other countries.

I grew up familiar with immigrant communities, and now live in San Francisco
which has a large Chinese population. It is possible in some neighborhoods
to walk down the street, and only occasionally see a non-Chinese face (but
not Grant Street in Chinatown, that’s a tourist trap). It is from immigrant
language adoption patterns that I see similarities comparing pre-Babylonian
Exile Biblical Hebrew to post-Babylonian Exile Biblical writings. I refer to
inter-generational language adoption shorter than the 70 years of the
Babylonian Exile. I don’t need to bring in Mishnaic Hebrew for this
comparison. And the Jews were immigrants in Babylon.

. . .
> >> 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.
>
> I think you mischaracterize the development of Latin.

While the different, at first dialects, later languages, developed from
Latin, it was Jerome’s Vulgate translation that provided an anchor that
limited further change of Latin itself. Because Hebrew and Greek scholarship
languished among medieval European scholars, the Vulgate was the standard
that everyone referred to. It also became the lingua Franca because it was
the only language that was common throughout Europe. While such studies
limited linguistic change, they did not stop it, thus many documents can be
roughly dated by their Latin style.

In Hebrew, the Torah had the same effect. It, more than the later prophets,
defined post-Babylonian Exile Biblical writing styles, hence extensive
archaicization.


> 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
> Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life


This is the b-hebrew, Biblical Hebrew, group. As such, the only reason
Mishnaic Hebrew is of any interest to the group is because of the claim that
it is a continuation of Biblical Hebrew, therefore it can provide insights
to Biblical usage.

If, on the other hand, it fulfilled the same role in late second temple
period as did medieval Latin, then the study of Mishnaic Hebrew will have
only little to contribute to understanding Biblical Hebrew and, in fact,
could actually be a hindrance to a proper understanding of Biblical Hebrew.
Therefore, what was the role of Mishnaic Hebrew in the lives of the common
people? Was it the language of market and hearth? Or was it merely the
language of religion, high literature, official documents, a language that
everyone was supposed to study, but only relatively few ever really
mastered? Was it a pure derivative of Biblical Hebrew, or was it largely
corrupted by an Aramaic speaking populace who only imperfectly understood
Biblical Hebrew?

A strict reading of history doesn’t answer these questions. Jews were in the
Babylonian Exile for almost three generations, long enough that it is
possible that the generation who came back to Judea were more at home in
Aramaic, if Hebrew was their mother-tongue at all. The theocracy that was
the Maccabees would certainly try to make all official documents be in
Hebrew, but they would have started with the Hebrew of their time. That
influence would have lasted to the end of the second temple. How deeply did
it go down among the common people? Though Hebrew was required learning for
at least all males, which would account for graffiti, was it a mother-tongue
at that time, having been continuously a mother-tongue since Biblical times?
I don’t think the evidence supports that.

Does a study of Mishnaic Hebrew help or hinder a proper study of Biblical
Hebrew? Why or why not?

Karl W. Randolph.