Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Bryant J. Williams III" <bjwvmw AT com-pair.net>]

Dear List,

The article below is from November, 2010,
http://balshanut.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/young-ian-what-is-late-biblical-hebrew-pages-253-268-in-a-palimpsest-rhetoric-ideology-stylistics-and-language-relating-to-persian-israel-edited-by-ehud-ben-zvi-diana-edelman-and-fra/

Rev. Bryant J. Williams III

Young, Ian, “What is ‘Late Biblical Hebrew’?” Pages 253-268 in A Palimpsest:
Rhetoric, Ideology, Stylistics, and Language Relating to Persian Israel, 
Edited
by Ehud Ben Zvi, Diana Edelman, and Frank Polak. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias 
Press,
2009.
The third chapter of my dissertation explores the difference in the use of את
between SBH and LBH, so I have been wading into some of the recent debate over
chronology and typology in biblical Hebrew. In this short article, Young 
gives a
helpful summary of the new approach that he has developed along with Robert
Rezetko and Martin Ehrvensärd.

While most students learn Biblical Hebrew (BH) as a monolithic whole, the 
Hebrew
Bible does reflect a certain degree of linguistic diversity. Scholars commonly
distinguish three types of Hebrew in the biblical period:

1. Archaic Biblical Hebrew is only represented in older poetry such as Jd 5, 
Ex
15, etc.

2. Early Biblical Hebrew (EBH, also termed Classical Biblical Hebrew or 
Standard
Biblical Hebrew) is the type normally taught in BH grammars. This is generally
considered to be a literary language used during the pre-exilic, monarchic
period. The core EBH books include the Pentateuch and Joshua-Kings.

3. Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH) is the post-exilic language found primarily in 
the
books of Esther, Chronicles, and Ezra-Nehemiah.

It has generally been assumed that the exile marked a time of social and
political upheaval which had linguistic repercussions. The returning exiles
would have mainly spoken Aramaic, the high language, while the lower classes 
who
remained in the West would have spoken a vernacular Hebrew which was the
ancestor of Rabbinic Hebrew. The new literary language, LBH, therefore,
represents the chronological development of EBH under these influences.

Hurvitz (and others) has further argued that post-exilic authors would be 
unable
to write in proper EBH, but that LBH features betray their setting. Therefore,
scholars have attempted to use the linguistic typology developed for works 
whose
provenance is relatively certain to establish the chronology of works whose
dating is less certain. For instance, Polzin (1976) isolated several features 
of
LBH which he then used to analyze the date of the P source. Hurvitz has also
analyzed the date of several Psalms (Hurvitz 1972) and the relationship of P 
to
Ezekiel (Hurvitz 1982).

The relationship between typology and chronology, however, is always
troublesome, particularly when there are few independent data points to 
connect
the two. As Kaufman (1986) has argued in regards to script typology,
socio-linguistic issues such as dialect geography and diglossia must also be
taken into consideration. In this vein, Young, along with Rezetko and
Ehrvensärd, has developed the argument that EBH and LBH do not represent the
chronological development of a single dialect, but two separate dialects which
could have coexisted within the same language community. EBH is a more
conservative dialect while LBH is less-so, allowing more variety.

Though Hurvitz argued that the presence of LBH features betrays the hand of
post-exilic authors, most of the features isolated as representative of LBH 
are
also found in the core EBH works, just less frequently. Therefore, the 
presence
of a feature itself cannot be an indication of date. Young, Rezetko, and
Ehrvensärd illustrated this by counting the number of LBH features in random 
500
word samples from various biblical and non-biblical texts. While the
accumulation of LBH features is greater in the core LBH books, there were
several works which were clearly written in the post-exilic period but which
feature a low density of LBH features (e.g. Job 1:1-2:11a, Ben Sira 41:2-44:4,
Pesher Habakkuk 5:3-12:13). On the other hand, the pre-exilic Arad Ostraca had
more LBH elements than any of the EBH samples considered.

Therefore, if these core EBH texts are in fact pre-exilic, then these LBH
features cannot be post-exilic, and Young argues that the choice to use the 
LBH
or its corresponding SBH feature must be stylistic rather than chronological. 
It
is better, therefore, to view LBH not as a ‘deteriorated’ form of SBH, but as 
a
distinct dialect.

In the conclusion to his earlier edited volume (Young 2003), Young suggested
that the use of the two dialects could relate to geography. The books written 
in
LBH are also generally considered to have an eastern provenance, while the 
books
written in EBH originated in Judah. While he still likes this theory, he also
notes several problems, most notably that Chronicles is generally considered 
to
have a western provenance (though see Person 2010). Here, Young refines this
view, suggesting that while LBH features were available to EBH writers, it was
only in the eastern diaspora that a new literary style developed which was 
open
to their use. This LBH style may have then migrated to the west where it was
used for the last chapters of Daniel and at Qumran.