Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

vayyixtov David
>I'll try to address the Josephus question later, but for now I'll just say 
>that your "evidence"
> weak at best, and rather selective.>

Please note: the references to Aristeas and Josephus were citations
of local testimony to the phenomenon of Hebrew being spoken in Judea.
Of course it was selective, the question was 'does such testimony exist?'
It does.

Their purpose was not to prove that mishnaic Hebrew was a colloquial
language (that is best done by analyzing mishnaic Hebrew itself and seeing how
it relates to literary Hebrew [and Second Temple BH])
but to answer the allegation that there were no ancient testimonies
to Hebrew being spoken colloquially in Judea.

Aristeas 11 and
Josephus War 5:272
both testify to Hebrew being used colloquially in Judea.
Someone is free to reject and/or to reinterpret the testimony, but it's there.

This is maybe something like Papias' statement when discussing the gospels
that the 'oracles of the Lord' were written in Hebrew. Many reinterpret 
Papias'
phrase in many ways (whether reasonably or not is irrelvant for this
first question), the
point is that there is a Hebrew testimony on that question.
Likewise, there is ancient testimony about Hebrew being used in Judea.

And if linguistic evidence adds support to such views, then they
should not be ignored
nor rejected just because it might be possible to reinterpret/reject
the testimony.

Maybe I should add a third testimony:
there is a story about Judah ha-Nasi's maid who made comments in Hebrew about
some rabbinic students entering the house in a "piecemeal" fashion,
and in another
context referred to a particular garden herb. In both cases the
students who overheard
claimed that is solved an exegetical question elsewhere, where the
principle was
that scripture is to be interpreted according to "common language
use". The maid,
by the way, turns out to be bilingual because she also made an Aramaic
comment in
another story and context, though with the same principle being extracted --
interpretation is according to normal language use. The passages were
not arguing
for a language per se, they become incidental testimony again pointing
to Hebrew
being known by commoners, and in this case a servant woman who knew words
and phrases that were not known by the rabbis in that center (200CE+).

blessings
Randall

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