Peter:
Judah haNasi’s maid is not a good example to this discussion—she worked in an environment where Hebrew was spoken, namely Judah haNasi’s house and school: if she had a head on her shoulders and any amount of linguistic ability, she could have picked up Hebrew from her surroundings. Just because she was a maid does not mean that she wasn’t smart nor able to learn Hebrew.
... The evidence I have seen indicates that a fluent knowledge of Hebrew was pretty much the realm of the elites by the first century, and for the common people, Aramaic was their primary language.
Notice, nowhere do I claim that Hebrew was not spoken fluently by at least a minority elite, just that the evidence pointing to a possible majority of the people speaking Hebrew as their primary language is weak at best.The important question here is one you have left open. Do you accept that there was a continuing community for which Hebrew was the mother tongue? That is what the DSS evidence strongly suggests, at least for the period before the destruction of the Temple. And if this did exist, it is what makes the significant difference from Latin in the modern period.
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