Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, “The Science of Language among Medieval Jews,” in Gad Freudenthal, ed., Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 359-424 (original) (raw)
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2014 Rezetko Young Historical Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew
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.
Linguistics, Philology, and the Text of the Old Testament
James Bar Assessed: Evaluating His Legacy over the Last Sixty Years, 2021
Among his significant contributions to the study of the Old Testament, James Barr’s sage work on the nature of philology and linguistics and their application to ancient texts figure prominently. Nearly sixty years ago, Barr published his first monograph, The Semantics of Biblical Language. Just seven years later he published his Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament. Then a year later he weighed in on the “conflict” between linguistics and philology, a topic he considered from a slightly different angle and extended to biblical studies as a whole twenty-five years later. In between, he demonstrated his attention to detail and sensitivity to text in his The Variable Spellings of the Hebrew Bible. Despite the considerable advances in biblical scholarship—the Dead Sea Scrolls have all been published, new Hebrew lexica (HALOT, DCH) have appeared to supersede BDB, and modern linguistic theories have been increasingly applied to the Biblical Hebrew—some of the same methodological concerns about language and text that prompted Barr’s work have surfaced again. While few of the philological or textual conclusions Barr reached can now be accepted without qualification, his attention to interdisciplinary questions of method combined with an eye to linguistic detail remains a model for scholarship and encourages us to apply a Barr-ian eye to method and theory for a new generation.
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.
Biblical Hebrew and the Semitic Languages in the Light of Cultural Antiquity: A New Proposal
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.
The Ancient and Modern Hebrew Language: A Short History, Contrast, and Comparison
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.