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  • From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Aramaic to Hebrew language switch?
  • Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2010 10:01:54 +0200

Dear Uri,

I agree with you in everything you have written in your post. During the last five years I have taught 4 semesters Ugaritic and 4 semesters the Amarna language, so I am familiar with the material. Regarding the Egyptian material I will add that the two occurrences of the name of God YHW(W) have been found in in Soleb in the reign of Amenhopis III (14th century B.C.E.) and one occurrence i Amarna West in the temple of Raamses II (13th century). The name is associated with nomads living in an area including the later land of Israel. As for the Amarna letters, to the Canaanite glosses we can add some West Semitic grammatical elements. So, people speaking a West Semitic language definitely lived in the land of Canaan in the 14th century. And they even may have worshiped YHWH. And as you say, it is obvious that their language did not originate suddenly in that century.

However, if I understand Jack correctly, he would say that this language definitely was not Hebrew because the ancestors of the later Hebrew-speaking people did not yet live in Canaan. I, on the other hand, see few problems in the account of Exodus, which tells that the ancestors of Israel lived in Egypt and spoke Hebrew, and that they entered the land of Canaan in the 15th century and continued to speak Hebrew. I am aware of a massive scholarly denial of this, but I find the assumptions behind and the evidence presented to be inconclusive. An old, but still valuable work criticizing the traditional views is "Redating the Exodus and Conquest," J. J. Bimson, 1981.

I would use the opportunity to qualify something I wrote in my last post to Jack Kilmon. I find that comparative philology used in connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls and other old manuscripts in order to establish and text and its age is very fine and give good results. But when comparative philology is applied to small texts like the one from Kirbet Keifaya the results are highly questionable.


Best regards,


Rolf Furuli

University of Oslo


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








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