Year: 2017
Type: report
Abstract: My topic begins from the fact that at the end of the Second Temple period, in the first century CE, there were apparently two varieties of Hebrew in use in the Holy Land.They take their names from the central corpora which use them: Biblical Hebrew (BH) and Mishnaic Hebrew (MH), although these varieties are not limited to those corpora.In the post-Second Temple period, MH continued to be used, but BH was not.Both varieties are Hebrew, and therefore have much in common; but they are clearly distinct from each other, with many obvious differences at all levels of grammar, in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon.So my question is this: Why and how did two distinct varieties of Hebrew come about?Since BH seems to be the original and older variety, where did MH come from to replace it?This question has been addressed before, but no single answer is agreed upon at present.I cannot provide in this lecture an in-depth review of previous research, but in brief I will begin with a few answers that have been given. Previous Views (1) BH died during the Exile, and MH is a later rabbinic invention based on it plus AramaicThis view is actually the earliest put forward, namely, that MH was created as an artificial scholarly language out of BH-or more precisely out of the Hebrew Bible itself-whose language was no longer spoken by rabbis whose mother tongue was Aramaic.This was proposed by Abraham Geiger (Geiger 1845).Geiger believed that Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken language after the Exile and was replaced by Aramaic; but for religious reasons, Jewish scholars developed a Gelehrtensprache, which was used for religious discussion and was not anyone's first language.The discontinuity between BH and MH is due to this.Almost all of the views that follow may be understood as reactions and counterproposals to Geiger.Most notably Moses Segal (1908, 1927) raised convincing objections, pointing to various features of MH which derived from neither the Bible nor from Aramaic, as well as grammatical phenomena that were unlikely to occur in any but a spoken language.This view found dramatic mid-twentieth century LANGUAGE CONTACT AND THE GENESIS OF MISHNAIC HEBREW 5 confirmation in the manuscript discoveries in the Judean Desert, which, among other things, have yielded documents in MH (or a dialect close to MH)-letters, contracts, and a list of buried treasure-that by no stretch could be attributed to rabbinical language-making abilities.1 Any theory of MH that considers it anything other than a "real" language is untenable.2 (2) BH is not the parent language of MH Some scholars believe that MH does not actually come from BH; as Moshe Bar Asher puts it, "it is not a matter of two successive stages of the language, but of two different synchronic systems, reflecting two different dialects" (1992, quoted in Perez Fernandez, 8).This view argues that MH is as archaic as BH (see Perez Fernandez, ibid.), and here the answer fails, in my opinion.The proponents point to a small number of features that are debatably archaic (such as the rel.pron.ֶ ,)שׁ 3 but overlook the vast number of typologically older traits found in BH, at all levels, including, for instance, the verbal system.This view tends to ignore the question of how MH came to be.1 Recent works on these texts-most notably the Bar Kokhba letters and legal texts from the caves not associated with Khirbet Qumran-include the following: M. O. Wise, Language and Literacy in Roman Judaea
Source: Apollo (University of Cambridge)
DOI: 10.17863/cam.9630
Author: Cook, Edward M.
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2615867598