Johann_Kaspar

If I remember well Josephus wrote his texts in Hebraic (not Aramaic) and they were not translated by himself into Greek. I found the quote where he is admitting not to be fluent with the Greek language (nor with any foreign language by the way), but I failed to find the place(s) where he is acknowledging the use of Hebraic. Did other authors write about that issue? Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

Johann

spin

The evidence is in Josephus, but it's not direct, though fairly conclusive.

1) in the intro to the Jewish War he says:

I have proposed to myself, for the sake of such as live under the government of the Romans, to translate those books into the Greek tongue, which I formerly composed in the language of our country

2) in the intro to AJ he says:

Now I have undertaken the present work, as thinking it will appear to all the Greeks worthy of their study; for it will contain all our antiquities, and the constitution of our government, as interpreted out of the Hebrew Scriptures.

3) in JW 6,2 he says

Upon this Josephus stood in such a place where he might be heard, not by John only, but by many more, and then declared to them what Caesar had given him in charge, and this in the Hebrew language.

He claims to be able to translate out of Hebrew and he claims to speak Hebrew, so when he says of the Jewish War that he "composed [it] in the language of our country", I think it's a safe bet that he composed it in Hebrew.

Of course there are many people who will claim that Hebrew for Josephus must have been Aramaic, but this is because of a priori commitments.


spin

Johann_Kaspar

Thank you very much for the detailed information! It is quite helpful.

Maybe one more question. Far more difficult I think. Where does the idea that Aramaic replaced Hebrew to the point of concluding that the Hebrew langauge was a "dead language" as a spoken language at the time come from? Or more exactly from whom (because I think it can be only a xian invention to downsize the Jews)?

spin

There are probably numerous reasons, but the three that come to mind are:

1) Jesus is given Aramaic to speak in the nt,

2) during Herodian times nearly all funerary inscriptions were either in Aramaic or Greek, and

3) the appearance of Aramaic translations of Hebrew texts, Targums, were thought to be indications of the need to provide texts in a language that the population could undeerstand.

To be added, the fact that Rabbinical texts were written in a Hebrew that, until the times of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was considered to be a post-biblical dialect, reflecting some kind of revival of Hebrew. That dialect is found in the scrolls, showing that it is older than previously thought possible and may be even much earlier in origin.


spin

judge

Thius seems a reasonable thought.
If the targums (translations) were not so that the population could understand them what were they for?

Why isn't the talmud in hebrew if that was the jewish language?

spin

We were dealing with the notion that Hebrew was considered a dead language and why it might have been considered so.

Targums were obviously translations for people to understand. Our problem is that there were numerous dialects in Judea, as partly can be seen in the Qumran texts, with at least three dialects of Hebrew and two of Aramaic. The Dead Sea Scrolls may be considered reflective of the written status quo, ie predominantly Hebrew dialects. I remember an interesting statement in a Talmud about marriage contracts which were done in Aramaic in Jerusalem and in Hebrew outside it. (I couldn't find it now, but I got the reference from Kutscher's analysis of the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran.)

And when were the Talmuds written?


spin