EHLL: Northwest Semitic Languages and Hebrew

This paper explores two questions: (1) What part do considerations regarding ancient Israel's history play in linguistic descriptions of the origins of Hebrew?; and (2) what general historical framework for the reconstruction of West Semitic literary compositions and the beginning of Hebrew literature emerges from this scholarly debate? Pre-proof version of contribution to volume Biblical Hebrew in Context: Essays in Semitics and Old Testament Texts in Honour of Professor Jan P. Lettinga (OTS, 74)

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.

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 2019

Scholars of ancient Near Eastern languages traditionally divide the Semitic languages into three major categories, broken down into numerous sub-categories. Hebrew finds a place in this taxonomy but only as a minor offspring of the great family to which it is related. However, to students of the Bible who take it seriously, Hebrew looms largest of them all because to them it was the divinely chosen conduit through which God revealed himself and his purposes for creation and history. One purpose of this paper among others is to justify the inordinate attention paid to this otherwise marginal tongue. Procedurally the paper will (1) survey the origin and development of the Semitic languages and literatures; (2) locate Hebrew within the larger family of the Semitic languages; and (3) engage the issue of the Hebrew language and the biblical text vis-à-vis their literary and larger cultural contexts.

Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, ed. Kees Versteegh. Leiden: Brill. 3.408–22, 2007

Beyond Babel: A Handbook for Biblical Hebrew and Related Languages., 2002

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.

Diachrony in Biblical Hebrew (eds. C.L. Miller-Naudé and Z. Zevit), 2012

A common assumption in modem scholarship has been that non-standard language usage in the biblical texts can only be explained as evidencing either pre-exilic northern or post-exilic southern Hebrew. This article argues that pre-exilic Judahite Hebrew was much more complex than merely being identical with standard biblical Hebrew. The argument discusses general socio-linguistic considerations, pre-exilic inscriptions, biblical texts (especially focusing on the work of G. A. Rendsburg). and Mishnaic Hebrew.