Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

>
>
> BTW, my teacher Aaron Demsky has pointed out that in Ezra-Nehemiah, those
> parts that are associated with Ezra the "scribe"/religious leader, use only
> ordinal numbers (e.g. Ezra 7:8-9). However, in those parts connected to
> Nehemiah, an officer of the Persian court, the "secular" names are used
> (such as Neh. 1:1).
>
> Yigal Levin
>
>
interesting! Well spotted!

Also, the flow of the logic of the rest of your argument makes perfect
sense. Month names alone are not a basis for saying the Hebrews stopped
speaking Hebrew. Even if they did speak Aramaic in public they most likely
spoke the holy language at home. We don't to go far to see such a phenomena.

After living in Italy for some time I began to wonder why I even bothered
learning Italian. Very few people speak Italian. Most 'Italians' speak
Italian very very bad and only use it as a kind of lingua franca to speak to
the tourists or people from other parts of Italy who don't understand their
dialect. In many places the dialects are so strong that they are spoken in
the streets, in the shops and not just within the family unit at home. When
I lived in the mountains in the Dolomites folk only spoke Italian to
outsiders. Often we would get tourists from the South and their version of
Italian was very different. In fact, only in places like Milan and Tuscany
do we see people speaking Italian with the fluency of a first language.

James Christian