Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Norman:

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 6:44 PM, Norman Cohn <normanncohn AT yahoo.com.br> wrote:

…

 

That brings into the fore another very difficult discussion: who exactly was the target audience of the Tanakh? Tricky question!

 

From everything that I can find, the target audience for the Tanakh was the common folk, farmers, shepherds, small town dwellers, etc.

There are some who try to make the argument that only the elite were literate. While that argument holds some validity in societies where the writing was difficult to learn, e.g. hieroglyphics or ideograms, the same is not true for syllabaries and alphabets. For example, when an alphabet was invented for Cherokee language, while they were yet tent dwelling nomads, within a couple of years they had almost universal literacy. English writing is one of the more difficult languages to learn, seeing as the spelling is often irregular, but languages that are strictly phonetically written can be written just the same way as a person speaks.

The situation in Ezra was a bit different—the common people no longer spoke Hebrew in the market nor at the hearth, so while educated people knew Hebrew, it had to be translated to Aramaic for the common people. Yet the common man was still the target audience, so the priests took the effort to translate it for the common man.

All the evidence that I can see, from the time of Moses through Ezra, it was understood that the common man was the target of the message.

 

 Thanks again for the reply and best regards!

 

Norman Cohn

São Paulo - Brazil.

 

Karl W. Randolph.