Amoraic Hebrew In The Light Of Ben Sira's Linguistic Innovations

Journal of Semitic Studies, 2020

Presently, most scholars hold that the linguistic status of Rabbinic Hebrew from Byzantine Palestine (380-640 CE) is that of a dead literary language, influence by Aramaic and earlier varieties of Hebrew, and that Hebrew had already died out as a spoken vernacular in the second or early third century CE. The sources for this variety are rabbinic texts produced by the Palestinian Amoraim and to a lesser degree, epigraphy. The article challenges this view, claiming that such opinions have not been based on a systematic morphosyntactic examination of Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew. The article presents such an analysis of a morphosyntactic structure, namely, pseudo-coordinated verb pairs. Two sub-structures are examined: (I) imperative + imperative and (II) imperative + yiqtol, in Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew, Tannaitic Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew is found to clearly align with Tannaitic Hebrew, and not Biblical Hebrew and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic.

Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, 2013

The paper deals with the text-critical challenge and the variationist analysis in application to the historical linguistics of Biblical Hebrew, coming out in recent research, particularly in Historical Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew by Robert Rezetko and Ian Young (2014). Different textual transmissions have become part of the linguistic corpus and an indispensable part of historical-linguistic research. Variationist analysis corroborates that some explicit innovative processes in the standard literary idiom of the Persian period were reversed by the conservative tendency, distinctive in the Qumran corpus, so that it will be more accurate to speak about two different stages in Late Biblical Hebrew development: Persian period and Late Hellenistic— early Roman periods.

Bulletin for Biblical Research

The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence for the existence of a later linguistic strand within the Hebrew Bible known as late biblical Hebrew. After surveying the history and methodology of the diachronic study of the Hebrew language, I examine orthographic, morphological, and syntactical evidence, which demonstrates a linguistic shift from the preexilic to the postexilic period. I demonstrate how these same late biblical features of the postexilic period became commonplace in Rabbinic Hebrew and in the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I discuss the different views regarding the reasons biblical Hebrew experienced linguistic change and argue that the events of the Babylonian exile contain all the components linguists regard as necessary to account for language change. An appendix is provided which contrasts the fourteen accepted features of late biblical Hebrew with their early biblical Hebrew counterparts.

The Hebrew language is a wonderful example of linguistic resilience in the wide and diverse realm of world languages. The language is today the revived and flourishing medium of communication for the people of the modern state of Israel, yet its history runs far deeper than most other languages found in our world. In this paper, the language is examined from an integrated perspective of Hebrew culture, Middle Eastern history, and diachronic linguistics.

This book seeks to break fresh ground in research on the history of ancient Hebrew. Building on theoretical and methodological concepts in general historical linguistics and in diachronic linguistic research on various ancient Near Eastern and Indo-European languages, the authors reflect critically on issues such as the objective of the research, the nature of the written sources, and the ideas of variation and periodization. They draw on innovative work on premodern scribally created writings to argue for a similar application of a joint history of texts and history of language approach to ancient Hebrew. The application of cross-textual variable analysis and variationist analysis in various case studies shows that more complete descriptions and evaluations of the distribution of linguistic data advances our understanding of historical developments in ancient Hebrew.

The biblical text implies that the language of the southern and northern monarchies differed, though with the exception of one anecdotal story no specifics are offered. While the hypothetical existence of a number of dialects is widely accepted, several scholars have claimed that there is actual evidence for at least two, possibly three, dialects in the text of the Hebrew Bible. In order to substantiate this claim a long list of grammatical features has been suggested over the past three decades. In this paper I will evaluate the evidence purported to prove the existence of Hebrew dialects, and show that it is weak and does not support the dialectal hypothesis. Keywords dialectology – Biblical Hebrew – Israelian Hebrew

Kantor, Benjamin. Review of The Reconfiguration of Hebrew in the Hellenistic Period, edited by Jan Joosten, Daniel Machiela, and Jean-Sébastien Rey. Revue de Qumrân 32 (1): 149–164, 2020