Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

John:

On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 7:31 PM, John Leake <jesleake AT yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

I'm glad we are broadly in agreement, Karl. As for the following:

While apparent literary style varied between those two dates, there’s little evidence of language change.

Well, I'm not convinced, but then I've not researched it. As a gut feeling I think it unlikely that eight hundred years of often violent political and social change would leave no trace on the language bar style.

That was one of the threads not mentioned in an earlier discussion questioning whether or not Biblical Hebrew was largely an isolated language. For much of their history, Judea was a small, mountain kingdom off the beaten path of little interest to empires. Further, most of the contact between Jews and their overlords, when they were a vassal nation, was through their king and a few of his courtiers, the common people had no contact with other languages and peoples.

The violent change was the Babylonian Exile, which resulted in the Jews adopting Aramaic as their everyday speech.

 

But it's hard to see phonetic changes through our nicely normalized Massoritic text, and as for semantic change... Anyway, I've never looked at the Hebrew in that detail.

I know the points don’t represent Biblical era speech, and they are often wrong as far as meaning as well. So I don’t trust them.

John Leake

Karl W. Randolph.