Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

>> 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.
>
>I know that's what it was.  And yes, it exists.  Why?  I would think the
>answer would be fairly obvious, given the historical contexts of both.

Well, Aristeas needed to explain the need for translators. But he did not
need to state that  Aramaic was not the current language of Judea and
he could have said that Hebrew 'had been' the language of Judea.
But he didn't.

Josephus with 'the son is coming' was having some fun. It would
have been sufficient for his purposes to simply say that warnings
were shouted to the people. A Greek reader wouldn't have even known
the difference between Hebrew and Aramaic, which didn't concern
Josephus here either. Josephus' note about
language use was without linguistic 'tendenz', but which turns out to
be linguistically competent. Modern historians, on the otherhand are
often less competent. At the beginning of the "War" Josephus says that
he first wrote the book to the diaspora 'in the patriarchal language'.
Historians may reason that in the diaspora Aramaic would have been
more widely know than Hebrew, therefore Josephus meant
"Aramaic" by 'patriarchal language. Yet here at War 5.272 we find out
that Josephus more probably meant Hebrew by 'patriarchal language'.

Then Karl, using presuppositionalism as if it were evidence, claims
that this anecdote was a linguistic law by radical religionists. Go figure!

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