spin

This might make sense to you because we've been through the renaissance, but you'd really have to stretch it for the Jews in that situation. You'd like us to think that the Jews invented using dead languages on their coins, and then, not as some motto, but as names and positions of people. I don't think you'd really want to try to justify that idea.

I wouldn't be so sure about the stories supplied by the Hasmoneans. The first Hasmonean may have been Simon, ha-Shmun.

Country scribes were not prepared as those in the scribal schools were, as they had a much wider scope of providing any document that his clients may have wanted. It is unlikely that people had a grasp of more than one language so the scribe, both reflecting that trend and taking advantage of it to limit his taks, would have only used the prevalent language of his zone.

The education of a scribe in mediaeval France would have been a lot higher than that of a country scribe in Judea.

However, the important thing I indicated was that someone needed to be able to deal with the content of the document, so it must have been in the language of the speech community.

Actually, ancient Hebrew is still a problematical language because there is a lot unknown about it and there isn't really enough text to supply a sufficient corpus to understand numerous features -- for example the Hebrew verb system is still greatly debated.

(I note that you have totally sidestepped the Dead Sea Scrolls evidence, most of which -- if not all -- shows no sign of any sectarian background.)


spin

Steven Avery

Ken gave it as a talk in Canada -
http://www.ccsr.ca/csbs/2003programme.htm
Canadian Society of Biblical Studies Annual Meeting

And its been discussed with scholars on the Internet, such as on b-hebrew, where the issue of Hebraisti comes up. I think the article may be an aspect of his PhD paper, however the details of all this have not been my real concern, and Ken is easy enough to contact for more official scholarship background. He also hosts the Megillot email forum (generally for scholars).

My goal has been to simply understand and discuss the evidences and theories, as I was always surprised to hear some folks say that the NT reference to Hebraisti was Aramaic (although not Tyndale, Geneva, KJB). In my experience, the references have all panned out. Of course in some cases, on interpretation, "your mileage may vary" (e.g. on the discussions of Aramaic names coming into the Hebrew language).

If the material there becomes an article in JBL, the basic material will still be the same :-) Feel free to offer counterpoint, your own or others -- and to contact Ken for more information on official scholarship status.

Shalom,
Praxeus
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic/

French Prometheus

But Hebrew was still a liturgical language known by the elite. On one of my coins there's a beautiful incription that translates as "Yonatan the High Priest and the Council of the Jews" (not my translation as I don't speak Hebrew even though I can recognize the letters). The language used on this coin only mattered to those who could read it (and the script is an ancient one that was no longer in use in manuscripts). Don't forget that the Hasmonean rulers were also high priests. They had a leading religious role in addition to their political role.

Do you know of any good reason to doubt the nature of the Hasmonean revolution against the Seleucids?

That's one possibility. But it's still not a convincing argument to make Hebrew a living language in first century Palestine. It would also be interesting to compare manuscripts written in Aramaic and Hebrew. Do they concern the same types of documents and the same class of people? A marriage contract between two peasants would probably not be the same as one between two aristocrats.

As I said, it's a good point but it's not convincing enough. The language in an official or legal document is not necessarily a good indication of the vernacular.

Well, every language that is no longer spoken is problematic even if people have been learning it continuously since the time when it was spoken. It's often interesting to see the mistakes made by Ptolemaic Egyptian scribes trying to imitate the language of the Middle Kingdom. Or Akkadian scribes writing in a version of Sumerian that would have sounded very weird to a native speaker living a thousand years before.

But what's the nature of the DSS written in Hebrew? Do they include personal letters?

And would documents written in Hebrew be real evidence that some of the people living in the Qumran community had Hebrew as their mother tongue?

French Prometheus

On this issue, I'm not a scholar myself (especially since I know very little Hebrew) so I'm not capable to evaluate the validity of his claims. This is the task of archaeologists and paleolinguists. That's why I asked you for an article published in a (widely-accepted scientific) peer-reviewed journal.

Chris Weimer

spin - Ever take a look at an English legal document in the year 2005? Definitely not what was spoken. However, the language at the Dead Sea Scrolls, from what I understand, is different from Biblical Hebrew, yet resembles in some ways Talmudic Hebrew. Would it be suffice to say it's the same as Medieval Latin, where most should know it, but they were not born with it first (even though Italian, French, and Spanish were very close to it, such as Aramaic to Hebrew)?

spin

The important thing to realise is that the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls was a living language. The scribes were concerned with how you wrote each word, showing their interest in the correct pronunciation. There are three dialects at least in the scrolls. Biblical, early mishnaic and an up to now unknown dialect which is featured in most of the "new" texts. Those texts feature not only interesting spellings but influence from Aramaic, ie it was being affected by Aramaic and therefore a living language. There is no way around this.


And those who make analogies with modern situations are wasting their time as they are unable to show the relevance of such analogies. One doesn't argue by analogy, merely elucidate arguments already made.

Because coins show Hebrew one cannot assume that Hebrew was merely the language of an elite. Coins are used by ordinary uneducated people and the languages were Greek and Hebrew. We must assume that the Hebrew was for the ordinary person.

As none of the scrolls was written at Qumran, ie it wasn't a scribal centre -- it was a small production centre --, we have to look at the origin of those texts and that was without doubt Jerusalem


spin

Chris Weimer

Do you think that the latter was like Renaissance Latin where their native thought patters influenced their learned second language, thus Aramaic, their native language influenced their learned liturgical Hebrew?

Johann_Kaspar

"I" am not "saying so", I am what I read. Obviously we do not read the same stuff.

The xian ideology from the start tried to discriminate and persecute the "Jews", those who go on speaking and reading Hebrew, keeping the law. Depicting the Hebrew language as dead in the first century goes along that line of thought. First negate or kill the language, than the people.
What is funny is that you can draw conclusions when being by your own admission illiterate in the Hebrew language. I suggest you will study it first. More difficult will be to get rid of xian prejudice.

Johann_Kaspar

Only necessary to do a google search to find out... :wave:

Johann_Kaspar

Are you assuming that people in Eretz Israel were illiterate?