Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Hi,

interesting! What's the evidence for the Phoenician origin? Does anybody
know what Ziv, Etanim and Bul mean?

Also, I think I agree with Yigal here. We would expect Chronicles, Esther,
Ezra and Nehemiah to be written in Aramaic if Hebrew had been already so
strongly supplanted. An argument based on month names is quite weak.

James Christian

2010/1/16 Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>

> Dear Karl,
>
> The names Ziv, Etanim and Bul all appear in the Bible only in the 1 Kings
> account of Solomon's reign, and are often assumed to be of Phoenician
> origin, adopted in Solomon's court due to his ties with the Phoenicians. In
> all other pre-exilic references, the months are known by their ordinal
> numbers, in which the month of Passover (so-called "month of Aviv", later
> Nisan) is first. The Israelites were commanded to count this as the first
> month in Ex. 12, although Genesis, written from a later (in this case Moses
> IS "later") perspective, seems to use this count as well.
>
> The Babylonian months begin to appear in the exilic and post exilic books
> such as Esther and Nehemiah, but I do not agree that they prove that the
> Jews had stopped using Hebrew as a spoken language. Note how
> Hebrew-speaking
> Jews today commonly use the European month names, albeit with a Hebrew
> accent (Yanu'ar, Febru'ar, Mertz etc.).
>
>