Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Paul Zellmer" <pzellmer AT sc.rr.com>]

You may have convinced Stoney, but your original proposition is still way off 
base.  The sole *surviving* witnesses are religious documents, but your 
proposition assumes that those form a legitimate sampling of the entirety of 
the historical works.  You bring out as support to your proposition the case 
of a people who had come from a lengthy stay in a land where both the trade 
and legal languages were something other than Hebrew.  One would not expect 
that the average person would then maintain Hebrew as their lingua franca, 
especially since there is significant evidence that many (perhaps most) chose 
to assimilate into the new culture.  How else should we interpret the fact 
that there was not an en masse exodus to the homeland when such was allowed?  
In this situation, we would expect that the ones who would preserve the "home 
language" would be those who would have motivation other than trade or 
day-to-day activities.  Those who are more concerned with religious matters 
would have such additional motivation.  So it is not at all surviving when, 
upon a revival of the religious matters, the average person, who might have 
never even learned the Hebrew language, would need the ones who preserved the 
language skill to explain the text to him.

We actually have Biblical claims that there were other documents written 
during the kingdom period, the period before the captivity which I believe 
caused the situation resulting in the priests needing to explain the text to 
the average people.  The books of the Kings make several references to 
chronicles which have not survived to the modern period.  Are you proposing 
that those were written in a language other than Hebrew, or that those were 
religious in character?  I would expect that they were indeed written in 
Hebrew, and were in general secular.  If these were Hebrew secular documents 
which did not survive the ages, why should we not expect that there would be 
other, more mundane documents which were not preserved?

Your Exodus reference (is it really too difficult for people writing Hebrew 
on this list to use right-to-left word order?) actually shoots your 
proposition in the foot.  If the nation is to be one of priests, would that 
not imply that the nation as a whole would have the skills of the priesthood? 
 If, as is your proposition, those skills would include literacy, it would 
follow that the nation in general would be literate.  This response to Stoney 
is an example of your habitual treatment of the Tanakh as a unified body. 
This may be acceptable in theological discussions, but goes beyond what we 
have generally agreed to do on this list.  We may refer to other texts to 
determine the meaning of a word or phrase or form, but to take the *teaching* 
of a passage and use it to interpret the meaning of another passage is 
getting away from the study of the language itself.

Every thread that you have tried to originate since you joined this list 
seems to have been aimed at making general statements about the Hebrew Bible. 
 Perhaps your posts would be more in line with the historical purpose of this 
list if you shifted your focus to the *elements* of the language and not the 
language in general or culture/history of the Hebrew Bible.

Well, I'm going to crawl back into lurker mode.  Too many other distractions 
to lengthy discussions onlist!

Paul Zellmer

-----Original Message-----
From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org 
[mailto:b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of fred burlingame
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010 1:16 PM
To: Stoney Breyer
Cc: B-Hebrew
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] the intended consumer of biblical hebrew language

An interesting theory, the secular nature of the biblical hebrew language;
but one bereft of factual support. Indeed, the sole witness to the language
includes a highly religious document, aka the masoretic text; and its dead
sea scrolls fragmentary predecessor. The internal testimony of that document
further confirms the intended religious nature of the language itself, given
the announced purpose of the nation writing the language.

ואתם תהיו לי ממלכת כהנים וגוי קדוש

  שמות 19:6


As for the consumer of the written language, the priestly monopolistic and
exploitative behavior that you propose, could have occurred only in the
general absence of written words or scrolls. Such generally accepted rarity
of written materials itself implies the illiteracy of the 14th century
hebrew, and the corresponding exclusivity of the written document for the
ruling class.