Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Will:

2011/10/3 Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>

> Karl,
>
> On Mon, 3 Oct 2011 12:36:39 -0700, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Randall:
> >
> > … Or for me, the
> > reason I got into Hebrew on a daily basis was because I had trouble
> > understanding Elizabethan English as used in the KJV. Similarly, a native
> > speaker of modern Israeli Hebrew will think he understands Biblical
> Hebrew,
> > but because of the changes in vocabulary meanings and grammatical
> structure,
> > how often will he misunderstand the text?
>
> This is a good point, but the problem can be overcome by proper study.
> Shakespeare's language, although technically Modern English, is different
> enough from contemporary English that the modern English reader will need
> notes to understand numerous differences of vocabulary, meanings, &c.  (And
> of course for Chaucer one will need *lots* of notes to understand them.)
>

While notes work pretty well for languages fairly well known and understood
as Elizabethan English, what sort of notes should be written for a language
not as well known as Biblical Hebrew for the benefit of modern Hebrew
readers? Further, how extensive would those notes have to be, seeing as
grammatical meanings behind the forms have changed significantly. Would
there have to be extensive notes for each verse? And how much admission that
there is still controversy concerning some of the meanings behind the forms?

>
> > When we don’t even know how Biblical Hebrew was pronounced, other than
> that
> > the Masoretic points coded for Tiberian Hebrew which was different from
> > Biblical Hebrew, how can it credibly be claimed that by using modern
> > pronunciation of Tiberian points we are thereby teaching Biblical Hebrew?
> > He’s whistling Dixie.
>
> I think it can be credibly so claimed.  Compare the situation of the
> classical
> languages.  In the case of Latin and (Classical) Greek, we think we know
> pretty well (mostly) how Cicero pronounced Latin and how Plato pronounced
> Greek, and nowadays when Latin and Greek are taught, some approximation of
> that reconstructed pronunciation is taught.  (I'm not in academia, so I
> can't
> say for certain, but my impression is that there is more of an effort on
> the
> part of some instructors to aim for a pronunciation closer to the
> reconstructed original that previously was the case.)  However, using these
> "restored" pronuncations is comparatively recent, and for centuries both
> Latin
> and Greek were taught using pronunciations that diverged widely from
> anything
> an ancient Greek or Roman would have spoken.  (The traditional English
> pronunciation of Latin survives in the realms of law and
> botanical/zoological
> nomenclature.)  But this doesn't mean that classical Latin and Greek
> weren't
> being taught - indeed they were, and those that studied Latin and Greek in
> those days frequently attained a level of expertise that would be
> exceptional
> to-day.
>

The situation for Latin and Greek are different for two reasons: 1) both
languages have extensive surviving literature from both their times and 2)
both languages continued to be spoken as native languages even as they
changed, either directly as in the case with Greek, and indirectly by
several offshoots in the case of Latin.

Biblical Hebrew, on the other hand, ceased to be spoken as a native tongue
over 2000 years ago, has very little literature in Hebrew outside the Tanakh
that survived from when it was spoken natively, showed fairly quick changes
after it ceased to be a natively spoken language consistent with non-native
speakers applying grammar, pronunciation and even words taken from their
native languages (Aramaic, Greek, etc.) to their understanding of Hebrew.

>
> Now the situation of Hebrew is somewhat different from that of Greek or
> Latin.
> First, what is "classical" Hebrew anyway?  The Hebrew text of the Bible was
> composed over a considerable period of time, during which Hebrew no doubt
> underwent many changes of pronunciation and vocabulary.  I think I remember
> reading (a *long* time ago) in some technical article that the language of
> Jeremiah was considered "classical Hebrew".  So, for the present, if we
> take
> the language of Jeremiah the language that one should aim for, how was it
> pronounced?  I'm not up on what might be the current state of thought on
> Hebrew historical linguistics, but I doubt that the level of confidence in
> a
> reconstructed pronunciation of Hebrew of Jeremiah's time would be up to the
> level of confidence in a reconstructed pronunciation of classical Greek or
> Latin.  And even if it were, it would not be represented directly in the
> Hebrew text that the learner has before him, which consists of a basically
> consonantal script with a superimposed system of vowels representing a
> pronunciation of more than a millennium later.
>

I tend to think of the period from Solomon to Isaiah as the apex of
classical Hebrew, making Jeremiah late classical, Ezekiel late native
speaker, possibly the last native speaker writer being Daniel who wrote half
his book in Aramaic expecting his readers to know Aramaic. The post Exile
writers being early non-native users of Hebrew, with varying expertise in
Hebrew as a second language, e.g. Nehemiah not knowing Hebrew as well as his
contemporary Ezra.

As far as pronunciation, when we look at poetry, if we read it as each
letter representing a syllable consisting of a consonant followed by a
vowel, the text then has a meter, a rhythm, that it lacks when read with
modern pronunciation. However, the modern pronunciation or a reconstruction
of Tiberian pronunciation based largely on Yemenite pronunciation, are very
similar and the most widely known, therefore any teaching should teach that.

>
> --
> Will Parsons
>

Karl W. Randolph.