FROM luah TO sefer AND BACK: AN EPISODE IN BIBLICAL HEBREW HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS (original) (raw)
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The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence for the existence of a later linguistic strand within the Hebrew Bible known as late biblical Hebrew. After surveying the history and methodology of the diachronic study of the Hebrew language, I examine orthographic, morphological, and syntactical evidence, which demonstrates a linguistic shift from the preexilic to the postexilic period. I demonstrate how these same late biblical features of the postexilic period became commonplace in Rabbinic Hebrew and in the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I discuss the different views regarding the reasons biblical Hebrew experienced linguistic change and argue that the events of the Babylonian exile contain all the components linguists regard as necessary to account for language change. An appendix is provided which contrasts the fourteen accepted features of late biblical Hebrew with their early biblical Hebrew counterparts.
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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.
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In 2014 Avi Hurvitz published A Concise Lexicon of Late Biblical Hebrew: Linguistic Innovations in the Writings of the Second Temple Period. In the present article we offer an alternative, quantitative interpretation of the data in the Lexicon. Our main conclusions are that the late language cataloged in the Lexicon is rare and idiosyncratic in late biblical writings and accordingly the value of the late language for linguistic periodization and linguistic dating is negligible.
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.