Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>]

    Rolf, 

    Perhaps I am a bit more optimistic about existing
 linguistic evidence for NW Semitic in the second millenium.
  Following are a few points that may shed some light -
 certainly not enough - on the situation in Canaan and
 surrounding areas in the second half of the second millenium.
   
  The Canaanite glosses in the Amarna letters demonstrate
 clearly that a  living west-Semitic language was known to
 the authors, and that such a language was in use. Aren't
 some of these glosses words which are found in the Hebrew
 bible? Surely they are few a number, but sufficient to
 indicate the linguistic background of the HB. 
  
  This is evidence from the second half of the fourteenth
 century. It would be methodologically wrong to assume
 that such NWS dialect had started only during the period
 of the EA.

   Ugarit's case may have some relevance here. It is of
 course commonly accepted that the language used there
 cannot be considered a NWS dialect. Yet there are
 dozens and dozens of identical idiomatic pairs of
 words common to Ugaritic and biblical Hebrew. Lexically
 BH shares more words with Ugaritic than Phoenician.

  It is hard to believe that an ancient Hebrew speaker
 would have found an Ugaritic speaker totally unintelligible.
 True, no one on this list was there to validate this
 statement. But some instances in  modern times of people
 speaking different dialects of the same language, say Arabic,
 come to mind. They may have initial difficulty in understanding
 each other, such as an Egyptian and a Tunisian, but soon
 enough they manage.

  Ugarit was destroyed in the middle of the thirteenth century,
 and no written material after its destruction survived.


   Another lesson altogether can be drawn from the existence
 of a large number of NW Semitic loan-words in the Egyptian
 of the New Kingdom. Considering the vast amount of
 written Egyptian material in existence by then, and
 the sophitication of the culture, this phenomenon is
 not easy to understand. However, such borrowing could
 not occur had there not been a living, functioning languge
 to serve as a linguistic lender.

   This, again, is an example from the second half of the
 second milenium. 

   Uri Hurwitz                           Wilmington, VT

 


Rolf Furuli , has written, inter alia:






Dear Jack,

  Old Aramaic is witnessed from around 900 and 
Hebrew from 1 100 B.C.E. Between these dates and 
the 17th century B.C.E. there are 800 and 600 
years respectively.  From the area where we later 
find the West Semitic languages we have almost 
nothing that can tell us what the situation 
regarding languages was during all these years. 
And please note, absence of evidence is not 
evidence of absence.

When discussing the origin of Hebrew and Aramaic, 
an important question is: "What can be subsumed 
under  "Hebrew," and what can be subsumed under 
"Aramaic"? For example, the Baalam text from Deir 
Alla from the 8th or 9th century have several 
forms  resembling biblical Aramaic and other 
forms resembling biblical Hebrew and Moabite. Can 
we draw any conclusions from these linguistic 
characteristics regarding the origin and 
development of Hebrew, Aramaic, or Moabite? 
Absolutely not! We simply do not know if the 
scribe was responsible for some of the mentioned 
characteristics, and we do not know if a small or 
big group used such a language. And further, we 
do not know whether other groups used a language 
which to a great extent or in part resembled 
biblical Hebrew or biblical Aramaic. To say that 
the few words from Kirbet Keifaya "*clearly* (my 
emphasis) shows Hebrew in the mid 11th to late 
10th centuries was still formative" is a very 
bold statement indeed. Except for hypotheses and 
speculations that the people whose descendants 
became the nation of Israel, adopted their 
language from the Canaanites, I am not aware of a 
single scrap of evidence excluding the 
possibility that small or big groups spoke a 
language which to a large or minor extent was 
similar to biblical Hebrew, and that other groups 
spoke a language which to a large or minor extent 
was similar to biblical Aramaic. I do not say 
that such groups existed, because I have not 
archaeological evidence in favor of it. But to 
deny the possibility is very strange to my 
thinking.

We find the same scientific fundamentalism in 
paleontology and historical geology as we find 
among those studying the origin of Hebrew and the 
Hebrews, Aramaic and the Arameans.  In a 
Norwegian textbook for students of historical 
geology, we find the following very interesting 
account: At Kolsos outside Oslo we find about 15 
layers of sediment, consisting of volcanic ash, 
red sediments and black sediments, all on top of 
each other in a particular pattern. At 
Sundvollen, about 50 kilometers away, we find the 
same sediments with the same colors with exactly 
the same pattern. These two groups of sediments 
were correlated and believed to be of the same 
age. Professor Brögger led an excursion with his 
students to Kolsos, and he found one single 
fossil!  On the basis of this lone fossil he 
dated the sediments at Kolsos to be sixty million 
years older than those at Sundvollen!  Why? 
Because of the fossil's theoretical place in the 
Geologic column, which again is based on the 
assumption that the theory of evolution is true. 
So perhaps some Cretaceous fossils are found in 
the Triassic after all.  I say this because "the 
Cretaceous" and "the Triassic" are not clear-cut 
references. From the middle of the 19th century 
when the Geologic column started to be 
constructed, to a great extent, Cretaceous rocks 
were identified because they contained Cretaceous 
fossils, and Cretaceous fossils were identified 
because they were found in Cretaceous rocks. And 
the same was true with the Triassic. True, in 
some places, such as the Grand Canyon, several 
periods occur on top of each other. But in most 
places of the world this is not the case  (Please 
note that I am not a creationist, but I simply 
apply the critical attitude that was so much 
stressed in my introductory course in to the 
Philosophy of Science, to areas which seldom are 
questioned). So, there is a lot of circular 
reasoning in historical geology and comparative 
anatomy. And the same circularity that we find in 
comparative anatomy do we find in comparative 
philology, in the comparison of ancient inscribed 
artifacts.

It is fun to discuss all this, but we should 
avoid sweeping statements that this or that is 
impossible. Rather we should take a more humble 
standpoint, being open for different 
possibilities.


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo