Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Qohelet

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Qohelet
  • Date: Sat, 5 Sep 2009 11:18:32 +0200

Dear Randall,

It is extremely difficult to date a document on the basis of linguistic evidence. This can for example be seen if we compare the completely different conclusions regarding the dating of Chronicles in the following three works: A. Kropat. 1909. "Die Syntax des Autors des Chronik," Beiheft für die Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft; R. Polzin 1976. "Late biblical Hebrew Toward an Historical Typoligy of Biblical Hebrew Prose" Harward Semitic Monograph Number 12; A. Hurwitz. 1968. "The Chronological Significance og "aramaisms" in Biblical Hebrew". Israel Exploration Journal 18: 234-240. (There are several other works of Hurwitz as well.) Polzin interprets the material in a very different way compared with Kropat and Hurwitz.

Let us first look at the the relative particle $. It is true that the use of this particle is typical for Mishnaic Hebrew. But how old is this particle? An Accordance search reveals that this particle occurs 113 times in the Tanakh, including four times in the book of Judges. The song of Deborah (Judges 5:7) where $ occur two times has been viewed as one of the oldest parts of the Tanakh. So, if the occurrence of words in the Tanakh that also occur in Mishnaic Hebrew is the criterion for the existence of proto-Mischnaic Hebrew, then proto-Miscnaic Hebrew is found in what is viewed as the oldest parts of the Tanakh. And if that is true, the argument of lexical dating falls completely apart.

The word PRDS occurs three times, and it is believed to be a loan word from the Persian Zend Awesta (600 B.C.E.). We should, however, keep in mind, that the language of this book is a branch of old Indo-Iranian, which existed a long time before Zoroaster lived. In this post I am observing and not arguing in favor of a certain age of Qohelet. I observe that in the first chapter the book as ascribed to king Solomon, who lived around 1.000 B.C.E., according to the chronology of the books of Kings. Would you deny that Indo-Arian languages existed at this time? If they existed, the word PRDS may have existed as well at this time, and contacts between Israel and indo-Arians could have been the reason for its adoption.

The word PTGM is found one time each in Qohelet and Esther. It is believed to be a Persian loan-word as well, and it can be viewed in the same way as PRDS.

I also find the argument regarding WEQATAL to be weak. Stylistic differences should always be taken into account in arguments regarding use and non-use of words and grammatical constructions. If we compared different parts of books ascribed to one single author, sometimes we would find great stylistic differences. There is no doubt that both the contents and the language of Qohelet are quite different compared with the rest of the Tanakh, but there are of course parallels as well. These differences call for great caution when one tries to date Qohelet on linguistic grounds. Moreover, there are three occurrences of WAYYIQTOLs in the book, forms that are not found in Mischnaic Hebrew.

From the point of view of the Philosophy of Science, dating attempts of Old texts on linguistic grounds collide head on with the Problem of Induction. This is particularly the situation in connection with the Tanakh, because we have practically no other old Hebrew texts to compare the Tanakh with. So the arguments are little more than educated guesses. One can appeal to the cognate languages, but how can we know with certainty who borrowed from whom? An Interesting example is Mitchel Dahood's work on the Psalms in the Tanakh (three volume in The Anchor Bible). Time and again he compares the Hebrew texts with the Ugaritic texts (14th-12th century B.C.E.). The vocabularies of the two languages are very similar. But how can we know that the Hebrew writers borrowed from Ugaritic, and that the forms in question were not Inter-Semitic, to the point where both Ugaritic and Hebrew writers used a common pool of words? ( "A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Language" by del Olmo Lete and Sanmartin lists cognates from many Semitic languages.) And even an Ugaritic borrowing from Hebrew in some cases cannot be excluded.

As for the comment of Delitzsch, I will turn it around this way: "There is no history of the Hebrew language, so we cannot know that Qohelet is a Second Temple work." For example, we know that the Akkadian langauge is old, because the Babylonians wrote on clay, but the hebrews generally wrote on material easy to be destroyed. But regarding Hebrew we have no clues at all regarding the age of the language. We have the Gezer Calendar (c. 900 B.C.E.), the Siloam inscription (c. 700 B.C.E.) and the "sudden" appearance of the books of the Tanakh. But what was before the Gezer calendar? According to Genesis 31:47, Laban spoke Aramaic and Jacob spoke Hebrew in the first part of the second millennium B.C.E. Again, I am not arguing for a particular viewpoint, only observing. And the observation is that we have no way to know whether the statement is true or not, whether Hebrew was spoken in the first part of the second century B.C.E. And the reason is that the Hebrew language has no history in the B.C.E.


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo




>> 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?>

Yes, Qohelet is a Second Temple document.
'pitgam' is Second Temple,
'pardes' is Second Temple.
(1. they pattern as Second Temple in the Hebrew
Bible, 2. they occur in cognate languages of the period, especially Aramaic
and mishnaic Hebrew [though of Persian origin], and 3. they are not accidently
left out of First Temple Hebrew because of lacking an approriate context. Gan
'garden' and 'devar' "word/decree' provided contexts.)
the preponderance of she- 'that' (70xx)
and the frequent use of ve-qatal (50xx) instead of vayyixtov is 'low
dialect' not just
Second Temple, and lines up with mishnaic Hebrew.

Delitzsch's comment 140? years ago, to the effect: "If Qohelet is not a Second
Temple work, there is no history to the Hebrew language."



--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
_______________________________________________
b-hebrew mailing list
b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page