Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Jim,

Some years ago a Hungarian scholar walked around 
in Mea Shearim in Jerusalem. Suddenly he was 
shocked, because he heard someone speak old 
Hungarian, which was a dead language at that time 
(it was believed). The group of Hungarians living 
there had kept their native tongue free from 
outside influence for more than one hundred years.

The point here is that there are many factors 
that can keep a language "pure" for a long time, 
or that it can  become mixed with other 
languages. For example, Amharic, the main 
language of Ethiopia, has many Berber words, 
while Tigrinja is much closer to Old Ethiopic 
(Ge´ez). Different factors must have caused this 
difference. Therefore, in my view the number of 
loan words from other languages in Hebrew will 
not tell us anything regarding the origin of 
Hebrew or where persons speaking Hebrew lived in 
ancient times.

BTW. The language of the Mesha stele (Moabite) is 
very close to biblical Hebrew, but Ugaritic is 
written completely differently from Hebrew and 
cannot be confused with Hebrew. True, there are 
great numbers of similar words in  Hebrew and 
Ugaritic, and I think Uri is right when he says 
that a speaker of ancient Hebrew would be able to 
understand much of what an Ugaritic speaker said. 
But still Hebrew and Ugaritic are two completly 
different languages. And what in the world is 
"Canaanite"?


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo


> Rolf Furuli:
>
> You wrote:  "[I]f 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."
>
> The Hebrews always lived in Canaan.  Most 
> historians agree that the Hebrews are indigenous 
> to Canaan, and that there is no evidence of the 
> Hebrews as a people spending any considerable 
> time in Egypt.  Just look at the language of 
> Biblical Hebrew, which is this list's long suit. 
> The Northwest Semitic words found in the Amarna 
> Letters are for the most part words that are 
> found in the Bible (though naturally the form 
> often varies).  There's precious little Akkadian 
> influence on Hebrew.  And there's also very 
> little Egyptian influence on Hebrew.  By 
> contrast, Canaanite and Moabite, to the extent 
> we can reconstruct those languages, and the vast 
> corpus of Ugaritic literature, have a very 
> similar vocabulary to Biblical Hebrew.  Biblical 
> Hebrew has only 70 loanwords from Akkadian (per 
> Paul V. Mankowski), and only 40 certain 
> loanwords from Egyptian (per T.O. Lambdin's 
> classic study in 1953).  Yet one cannot even 
> talk about the concept of "loanwords" in Hebrew 
> from Canaanite or Ugaritic, because the 
> vocabulary is so similar.
>
> If we look at the language of early Biblical 
> Hebrew in the Patriarchal narratives, the 
> history of the Hebrews is staring us in the 
> face.  The Hebrews did not originate in 
> Mesopotamia.  The word (BR-Y/"Hebrew" does not 
> mean "the crossing a boundary people".  Rather, 
> the Hebrews are indigenous to Canaan, as the 
> author of the Patriarchal narratives knows and 
> reflects in his composition.  The language of 
> the rest of the Bible confirms that the Hebrews 
> did not spend their formative years in Egypt, 
> because there is so little influence of Egyptian 
> on Biblical Hebrew.
>
> Some scholars say that NYXX at Genesis 8: 21, 
> meaning "sweet" in Hebrew, comes from the 
> Egyptian word for "eternity", NXX, but that 
> seems a big stretch to me.  Of course, "pharaoh" 
> obviously comes from Egyptian, as would be 
> expected.  Interestingly, going the other 
> direction, Egyptian has a large number of 
> Semitic loanwords.  But that is not surprising, 
> considering all the Canaanites who wandered into 
> Egypt over the centuries, and the period of 
> Hyksos rule over Egypt.
>
> You know Hebrew.  It's difficult to distinguish 
> Hebrew from Canaanite and Ugaritic and Moabite. 
> Yet it's hard to find many Akkadian or Egyptian 
> loanwords in Biblical Hebrew.  The language of 
> Biblical Hebrew itself is telling us that (i) 
> the Hebrews are indigenous to Canaan, and (ii) 
> the Hebrews did not spend their formative years 
> in Egypt.  The Hebrews were always in beloved 
> Canaan.  That's what the Patriarchal narratives 
> say, and that's what both history and 
> linguistics confirm.
>
> Jim Stinehart
> Evanston, Illinois