Hebrew (Biblical and Epigraphic)

Advances in Biblical Hebrew Linguistics Data, Methods, and Analyses, 2017

2014

forms /malk, qudš, sar/ are found in Origene's transliteration of the Hebrew Bible (3rd century C.E.), while in the Septuagint transliteration (3rd century B.C.E.), one finds the later bi-syllabic forms similar to those of the Tiberian vocalization). Hebrew ceased to be spoken about the 3nd century C.E. and persisted only in a written form (cf., among others, Rashi's commentaries of the Bible and Talmud, 11th century C.E.). From the 3rd century C.E. on, Hebrew continued to be used for juridical, intellectual, philosophical, poetic and liturgical purposes but not for daily oral communication save in particular circumstances when Jews from different countries had to resort to in order to understand each other. In Muslim Spain, written Hebrew acquired new characteristics: it is Medieval Hebrew (MdH). At the turn of the 20th century that it became anew the mother-tongue of an ever increasing population. Its use is no longer limited to any particular aspect of life but embraces all of them. The two millennia during which the language was not used in oral communication prevented it from evolving significantly, but they are also responsible for the fact that a six-year old Israeli child learning to read can understand the content of a Biblical or a Mishnaic passage, whereas no English child-and very few adults, for that matter-can understand a single sentence of Beowulf at a simple reading. 'Old English' is not 'English', so to speak, whilst understanding of one form of Hebrew-Biblical, Mishnaic, Dead Sea Scrolls, Medieval or Contemporary-allows a fair comprehension of all the others. 3. Script The ancient Hebrew script is ultimately descended from the Sumerian cuneiform logosyllabary, adapted to Semitic in Ugarit as early as 1500 B.C.E., then modified in Phoenicia yielding a consonantal range of symbols, whence it was adapted by speakers of Hebrew to write their own vernacular. This Palaeo-Hebrew script, represented in epigraphic and epistolary texts from the first two millennia B.C.E. is preserved to this day by the Samaritans. The speakers themselves, however, replaced it in the the Second Temple period by the Square Hebrew alphabet, an Aramaic-inspired version of the same Semitic alphabet. Some of the DSS, from this very epoch, are written in this alphabet. The vocalization system developed in Tiberias in the 8th century, but it reflects a very old pronounciation upon which is based the reading tradition. Ultimately, the Tiberian system was selected rather than two others, the Babylonian and Palestinian ones, which were not as complete. The cantilation signs were invented at the same epoch and were meant to codify the musical rendition of the Biblical text. Although they are not part of the linguistic system as such, these signs are narrowly linked to intonation and facilitate syntactic parsing, pragmatic analysis and disambiguation of certain passages which otherwise would be difficult to interpret. The cantilation signs appended to the Biblical text probably constitute the first codified musical notation system. 4. Genealogy Hebrew belongs to the Semitic language family within the Afro-Asiatic stock (cf. Bynon 1984). For the time being, let R 1 R 2 R 3 represent the three radicals supposedly inherent to the Semitic root; emphatic /t/ will be represented by a capital, emphatic /s/ by <c> and voiceless fricative-latéral <ś> by //. According to the model based on shared innovations (Faber 1998, in Hetzron 1998) this family is divided into two major branches: (1) East Semitic (ES) includes Assyrian and Babylonian, both of which are known under the common term 'Akkadian', as well as Eblaite; (2) West Semitic (WS), divided into two main sub-branches: (a) Central Semitic, including on one hand Arabic and on the other the Northwest Semitic group, constituted of Ugaritic, Canaanite (including Hebrew), Aramaic and Deir-Alla; (b) South Semitic, whose western group includes Ethiopian and Old South Arabian, and whose eastern group includes contemporary Soqotri, Mehri, Harsusi and Jibbali. Within the Canaanite group of Northwest Semitic, in the Central-Semitic sub-branch of the WS branch, Hebrew is akin to Moabite (known above all from the tombstone of King Mesha, from the

'Hebrew' originally designated Aramaic; when did it come to mean another language? And if 'Hebrew' was Aramaic, who were the 'Hebrews'? The article suggests thy were Aramaic-speaking residents of the territory known as 'Beyond the River', of which, in Akkadian, Aramaic and Hebrew, the first component is 'br. The 'Hebrews' of the Bible (both Testaments) are residents of ancient Palestine, including Judeans and Samaritans.

Journal of Theological Studies, 2005

The book is handsomely presented, although somewhat marred by numerous typographical errors, and could well become a basic textbook on its subject. Modest bibliographies are presented in the footnotes, but the volume overall is well served by copious indexes of authors, texts, and subjects. It deserves to become a well-used handbook, since every chapter provides starting points for further reflection. At times one is left disagreeing with the interpretation given, but probably that simply reflects that no theodicy is altogether likely to prove satisfying.

Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, 2013

This review was published by RBL 2006 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp. But although we can establish that the language has in general little significance for the literary history, there is one well-known exception. In the books of Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Daniel, Esther, and Ecclesiastes, there is one linguistic level that differs clearly from Standard Biblical Hebrew (SBH). We are indebted to A. Hurvitz in particular for his valuable research into Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH). He has gathered together the morphological, syntactical, phraseological, and lexematic characteristics of this linguistic stage and has described its difference from SBH, as well as the features it shares with Qumran Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew. The influence of Aramaic on LBH emerged clearly. Hurvitz used this finding to show that the language of the Priestly Code is SBH, not LBH. On the basis of this result, he considers it possible to maintain that the Priestly Code was composed in the preexilic period.

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

This article first discusses the argument that since Standard Biblical Hebrew (SBH) is identical with the language of the Hebrew inscriptions of the monarchic period, it cannot be dated to the Persian or later periods. In response it is argued that even if SBH is identical to inscriptional Hebrew this does not prove that SBH was not also used, say, in the Persian period. Then it investigates the inscriptions and concludes that in fact they represent an independent linguistic corpus (or more than one) rather than being identical to SBH. Updated with better copy January 2018.

The speech community. Transitional Biblical Hebrew (= TrBH), like Biblical Hebrew (= BH) more generally, was not the language of a specific speech community. It was rather a heterogeneous historical layer of the ancient Hebrew literary register as reflected in certain works of the Hebrew Bible, representing various genres (narrative, poetry, prophecy, hortatory rhetoric), writers of diverse vocations (historian, prophet, poet), and several regional contexts (principally Judah and Babylon). TrBH is a term of convenience, since in reality this stage of ancient Hebrew is no more "transitional" than the language's other historical strata. Each was a phase in the perpetual process of evolution between preceding and successive stages. TrBH's uniquely transitional label owes to the fact that it would appear to link the two more well-defined historical stages known as Classical (or Standard) Biblical Hebrew (= CBH or SBH) and Late Biblical Hebrew (= LBH). The label also reflects the perspective according to which CBH is viewed as the norm. This is justified not only because a majority of the Bible is written in CBH, but because later writers evidently considered it a literary standard worthy of emulation.