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  • From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Qohelet
  • Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:27:33 +0200

Dear Uri and Randall,

I have of course my own views regarding the origin of Qohelet. But in my posts in this thread I have not argued in favor of a particular age of the book. But I have tried to show that the linguistic evidence presented by those who argue in favor of a post-exilic origin of the book is weak and inconclusive, even to the point where the evidence is unscientific (given the fundamentals of the Philosophy of Science that first-year students learn). The basic scientific principle that is violated in the studies of Avi Hurwitz and others is that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

We do not know the peculiarities of spoken Hebrew and its vocabulary in the 10th century. The fragments you (URI) mention give us some glimpses of the Hebrew language at their time of writing, The words they use were of course a part of the vocabulary, but they tell us nothing about the 10.000 or more other words that were used. As for Mishnaic Hebrew, we do not know its origin. When I analyzed all the verbs of Ben Sira and the DSS written in Hebrew, my conclusion was that while there were many linguistic peculiarities, the *meaning* of the conjugations were the same as in the Tanakh. It is likely that the spoken language of the people in the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C.E. were different from the written language-some glimpses can be seen. But by and large, we know almost nothing about the spoken language at that time.

As far as vocabulary is concerned, I see the similarity between the few words mentioned by Randall and Mishnaic Hebrew, but any similarity between the WEQATALs of Qohelet and Mishnaic Hebrew I do not see at all. There is no doubt that the verbal system of Qohelet is Biblical Hebrew and not Mishnaic Hebrew. When we are engaged in a scientific study, and we get results that match our predictions, or we see similarities between what we are researching and something else, a careful scholar will ask whether there are particular factors that could have caused these similarities other than those described in our hypotheses; to the point where the similarities between our research objects are not real. In order to approach the issue we are discussing in a scientific way, we should ask similar questions. Qohelet is a unique piece of work among the books of the Tanakh, so we can ask: Could this special philosophical genre explain its special language? That question should be explored! We could also make a study of the interaction of the ancient languages of the Middle East, and ask whether this interaction could throw some light upon Qohelet's special language.

POSSIBLE CANAANITE-PHOENICIAN INFLUENCE

Regarding the last point I would like to refer to an old but very interesting article, which presents a view very different from the Proto-Mishnaic hypothesis, namely that there is a very strong Phoenician influence in Qohelet. If that is the case, that would conform with an authorship of king Solomon. The article is: M. J. Dahood (1952) "Canaanite-Phoenician influence in Qohelet". Biblica 30-52, 191-221.
I have a good background in Phoenician and Ugartiic , since I have taught several courses and have translated many documents from these languages into Norwegian, and I am very impressed by the parallels presented by Dahood.

One particularly interesting point is as follows (p. 4):

"The Phoenician hypothesis does not deny that Qohelet's style shows marked similarities to Mishnaic Hebrew, for Phoenician also shares a number of syntactical and lexical parallellisms with Mishnaic Hebrew which are not found in Biblical Hebrew."

This indicates that factors that seem to be parallel between Mishnaic Hebrew and Qohelet, and therefore suggest a young age of MH, could be much older, and in reality stem from Phoenician. There are, for example, some linguistic parallels between Qohelet and the Phoenician Karatepe inscription from the 9th century. Dahood show parallels between Phoenician/Ugaritic in vocabulary, orthography (pronominal suffixes, the demonstrative pronoun, the relative pronoun, the indefinite pronoun, the article, different nominal formations, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions), and a host of syntactical phenomena. He closes his article with a list of 29 commercial terms found in Qohelet which are most appropriate for a commercial culture such as was characteristic of the Phoenicians.

Dahood does not prove his case -proofs of such things are not possible to acquire. But he presents a very good alternative to the view that Qohelet has some Proto-Mishnaic traits. Some of these traits may very well be as old as the 14th-12th century B.C.E. (The Ugaritic period) and have nothing to do with post-exilic times.

LOAN WORDS.

I have already discussed PARDES, but I will elucidate a little. The word is viewed as a loan word from the Zend Avesta (c. 600 B.C.E.). Its language is a branch of old Indo-Iranian, whose predecessor was the Median language of which we only have some loan-words in Old Persian and no documents. Thus the word may have existed in the days of Solomon, and his traders may have adopted it. It is possible that the word was adopted from Sanskrit, where we find the word "paridhis" for "park". The pre-classical form of Sankrit (the language of the Rigveda) dates back to c. 1.500 B.C.E. The word "pitgam" may also have been adopted from the Sanskrit word "pratigama". We can show similar possibilities for other words. We therefore see that the supposed Proto-Mishnaic traits of Qohelet may not suggest a post-exilic writing at all.


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo




Dear Rolf,
The opposition to the the evidence about diachronic development of BH,at least in this debate, did not seem take into account the evidence of Hebrew inscription which have been dated to pre-exilic times. Whether in the Lachish letters, the Arad material , the Yabneh letter, or many others smaller fragments, there is in them no scintilla of evidence of Mishnaic language.

One may bring as a further point, the evidence of dialogue, or direct speech which authors of many texts within the HB books used in their narrative, such as "Am I my brther's keeper?" This was done for various reasons, but the overriding one was to introduce the drama of live conversation. This was done in the living style familiar to the authors and their hearers or readers. Again, there is not the slightest trace of what would become Mishnaic language, such as is obvious in the style of Qohelet.

That the latter is a late book, can be deduced from its content alone.

Uri Hurwitz

( Please do not mix me up with Avi Hurvitz, not a relative )




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