Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Jack:

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Jack Kilmon <jkilmon AT historian.net> wrote:

>
> Hi Kimmo:
>
> …  Although Aramaic was the spoken vernacular of the 95% of the
> people who were illiterate in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE,


You have mentioned that figure before, but where do you get that from? Which
people are you talking about?

My understanding from the practice in other languages, is that where
languages are written phonetically, there tends to be the opposite, around
95% literacy rate. My understanding is that both Hebrew and Aramaic were
written phonetically, but that the “am ha-aretz” had only a rudimentary
knowledge of Hebrew, so their knowledge was illiterate for Hebrew, not for
their natively spoken language. However, so much was destroyed in the two
Jewish wars that it is impossible for us to get a clear picture today.

I also wonder about your definition of “literate”? From what I have seen, in
practice it means more than just the mechanical ability to read and
understand written text. So in the context of the late second temple Judea
and Galilee, we have indications that the people spoke local dialects of
Aramaic that were close but noticeably different, and probably both differed
from literary Aramaic. So rather than being wrong, as Randall avers,
phonetically written Aramaic reflected the local dialectal varients of
Aramaic, not “wrong” Aramaic written by people who spoke another language.


> …
> Hebrew was indeed a living and
> dialect-developing language in several social pockets in and outside of
> Judea.  If it were not so, we would not have so much fun with the DSS of
> several centuries.


I distinguish between “living” and “natively spoken” and/or “primary
language” (both are pretty much synonyms) and I think it fits here.

We have the later example of Latin as a living language that developed and
produced dialects, yet was spoken natively by no-one. It was on the basis of
being able to date the changes within Latin that certain famous forgeries
were recognized as being forgeries.

So Hebrew in the context of the rich linguistic millieu of the late Second
Temple was a language that was still in use as a religious, legal and
literary language of the educated elite, but only a rudimentary knowledge of
which existed among the common people.


>  For a long time, Aramaic-invested scholars  eschewed the
> suggestion of Hebrew use at all in the 2nd temple period.  Ditto for
> Hebrew-invested scholars or nationalists for Aramaic.  This is well
> demonstrated when Yigael Yadin showed Ben Gurion the Aramaic letters of
> Shimeon bar Kochba and Ben Gurion flew off the handle because they were not
> in Hebrew (They were mainly in Aramaic).


Part of the reason for my conclusion above.


> Some New Testament scholars totally
> invested in NT Greek get red in the face and apoplectic when I discuss the
> Aramaisms of the NT and the benefit retroversion can play in resolving
> variations in the Greek texts for a pericope whose oral or written source
> was Aramaic.


Most of my knowledge of koiné Greek is from the NT, and I admit that those
portions of the NT I find easiest to read are precisely those where the
Greek is most Aramaisized (most notibly the writings of John).


>   …  As a scientist, I try to look only at the
> evidence.   Tomb and amulet, graffiti and some ossuarial inscriptions are
> more than just place or personal names and have been found in the Galilee,
> Carmel and Northern Judea.  Aramaic ostraca and jar inscriptions from Arad,
> tel Jemmeh and Tel Beersheba.
>
> One strong indicator, IMO, for the "language of the street" is the writing
> OF the "people of the street," the larger group between literate and
> illiterate that statistics overlook...the quasiliterate.  This takes its
> form most noticeably on ossuaria where the family members of the deceased
> scrawled the names on the box in what is normally a graffito style.  No
> better example is the extremely awkward scratches of the High Priest
> Caiaphas' name and, perhaps, on the James Ossuary.
> ALL of the Semitic inscriptions on all of the catalogued ossuaria are in
> Aramaic.


Randall listed sources that question you on this claim, and Randall’s claims
are what I would expect in the language rich environment of late Second
Temple: some of them would be in Hebrew, written by a literate person either
because the family was literate in Hebrew (those who were wealthy enought to
afford ossuaria were more likely to be literate in Hebrew because they could
more afford an advanced education) or would hire a Hebrew literate person to
write on the ossuaria.


>  The language commonly spoken will be the language commonly
> misspelled or grammatically incorrect on ossuaria, ostraca, graffiti, and
> that is nearly exclusively Aramaic.


As I wrote above, are these varients wrong, or dialectal? How would one
tell?


>  I also think that loan words will drift
> from the common tongue to the language of literati and liturgy as
> demonstrated in the peppering of 2nd temple Hebrew with Aramaic loan words
> and the relative few Hebrew loan words in Aramaic up to the 1st half of the
> 1st century.  In short, besides an overwhelming amount of other indicators
> for Aramaic as the commonly spoken language, graffiti is the strongest and
> graffiti (like Hamath) was in Aramaic.
>

I add to that that the literary style of the post-Babylonian Exile Biblical
authors indicates that they wrote in a second language Hebrew, rather than
it being their primary language. Admittedly that is at the early end of the
Second Temple period, but the evidence I have seen is that Hebrew never
caught on as an everyday language from then on, despite reform efforts. Even
though externally Judea was a vassel state from the Persian era and
afterwards, internally it remained a theocracy until the first century AD
with Hebrew as its official language, hence Hebrew remained a living
language, but I see no unquestionable evidence that it ever was a natively
spoken or primary language of anyone during that period.

>
> Regards,
>
> Jack
>
> Jack Kilmon
>

Karl W. Randolph.