Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Jonathan:

On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 7:21 PM, Jonathan Mohler <jonathan.mohler AT gmail.com> wrote:

…

Hi Karl,

I agree with Jerry.  You speak in hyperbole.  For example you often speak of a 1000 yr gap between the Masoretic tradition and speakers of BH.  This ignores several factors. 1) Hebrew was spoken without interruption well into the common era in Tiberias and other parts as well.

Even 1500 years after the Roman empire fell, Latin is still spoken.

However, probably that whole 1500 years, no one has spoken Latin as his native tongue.

You need to distinguish between those two different ways of speaking Latin.

All the evidence I have seen, including in Ezra and Nehemiah, indicate that those Jews who returned from the Babylonian exile spoke Aramaic as their native tongue. Yes, Hebrew was spoken, but no one spoke it in the market nor in the home. In short, no one spoke Hebrew as his native tongue.

Further, Biblical Hebrew was replaced by Mishnaic Hebrew by the time of the DSS, which has been reported as having a different grammar, among other things, from Biblical Hebrew.

 

 2) So the time span  between an era of spoken Hebrew and the beginning of the Masoretic effort is much smaller, if not negligeable.  3) if they were passing on an oral tradition, we can be quite confident that much of what is passed on comes from antiquity. The veracity of oral traditions is well established in anthropological circles.

That veracity of oral tradition doesn’t extend to pronunciation. The biggest changes in pronunciation would have come in the first couple of generations of native Aramaic speaking Jews. Phones found in Biblical Hebrew but not in Aramaic would have been dropped by the first generation of Aramaic speaking Jews (mirroring what happens among immigrant families, where even when children are brought up to speak their parents’ language before going to school, those children tend to lose the ability to speak certain phones by the time they reach college age).

No doubt some of the pointing represents a later pronunciation from that of Moses.  I would love to engage you on some of my thoughts in a new thread.

 …

Blessings,

Jonathan Mohler

Karl W. Randolph.