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Hebrew Language I. Introduction

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Hebrew Language I. Introduction 637 Hebrew Language 638 History 5.2 (1982) 133–53. ■ Lenowitz, H., “On Three Early guistic system known as Late Hebrew (attested in Incidences of Hebrew Script in Western Art,” in Maven in the Second Temple and Rabbinic periods). Blue Jeans, FS Z. Garber (ed. S. L. Jacobs; West Lafayette, Ind. Our material sources for the Hebrew language ■ 2009) 441–54. Longland, S., “Pilate Answered: What I consist of two types. The first, and the more signifi- Have Written I Have Written,” BMMA 26.10 (1968) 410–29. cant in terms of quantity, is literary, i.e., texts that ■ Mellinkoff, R., Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern Euro- pean Art of the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley, Calif. 1993). ■ Na- originated in the relevant period, but whose manu- gel, A., “Twenty-Five Notes on Pseudoscript in Italian Art,” script evidence dates only from later periods. The in Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59–60 (2011) 228–48. second is material, i.e., papyri, epigraphic texts ■ Putík, A., “The Hebrew Inscription on the Crucifix at written on pottery shards, and inscriptions embed- Charles Bridge in Prague: The Case of Elias Backoffen and ded in mosaics and stones. Only the Bible belongs Berl Tabor in the Appellation Court,” JudBoh 32 (1996) 26– to both types of sources since the complete extant ■ 103. Sabar, S., “Between Calvinists and Jews: Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible are dated only to the high Script in Rembrandt’s Art,” in Beyond the Yellow Badge (ed. M. Merback; Leiden 2008) 371–404. Middle Ages, but fragments of biblical passages Ilia Rodov were found in Qumran and elsewhere, some dating even from the earlier centuries BCE. This category See also /Funerary Inscriptions; /Hebrew of sources also includes transliterations of Hebrew Language (individual words and complete texts) to other lan- guages, as in the case of the second column of Ori- gen of Alexandria’s Hexapla. Hebrew Language There are also oral traditions of the various Jew- I. Introduction ish diasporas as well as of the Samaritan commu- II. Hebrew Bible/Old Testament nity for the reading of the literary text which are III. Judaism significant for phonological knowledge of the lan- IV. Christianity guage of the literary corpora. V. Literature From the time of the Assyrian period, speakers VI. Music of Hebrew were exposed to other non-Canaanite Se- mitic languages, especially Akkadian and Aramaic. I. Introduction With the Persian period, Indo-European languages Hebrew is a Canaanite dialect belonging to the began to impact on Hebrew: first Persian, and then, Northwest Semitic family of languages. It was spo- after the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek, ken by the population of ancient Israel in the region and with the expansion of the Roman Empire, of Palestine until the early centuries CE. As a result, Latin. This linguistic contact should be regarded most of the texts canonized in the HB were com- from two different angles. Firstly, it is evident that, posed in Hebrew and thus Hebrew was awarded the depending on the location, there were bilinguals (or status of a sacred language. even multilinguals) who spoke at least one other With regard to the Hebrew language, a distinc- language besides Hebrew. It is therefore possible to tion must be made between the history of the lan- trace how the situation of the languages in contact guage as a linguistic system and the history of its exerted its influence first and foremost on the lexi- written forms. The former conforms to an idealized con, but to some degree, also on the grammar. Sec- periodization of the language and differentiates be- ondly, there is some evidence of a diglossic distribu- tween Old Hebrew and Late Hebrew; the latter, tion between Hebrew and the other languages with however, bases the division on corpora thus result- which it coexisted. The term diglossia describes the ing in the traditional characterization, namely Bib- coexistence of two (or more) languages or of two lical Hebrew, Qumranic Hebrew, and Rabbinic He- varieties of one language within one speech com- brew (with further sub-characterizations). There are munity. It characterizes multilingual situations in reciprocal relations between the two divisions: on which the functional domains of each of the lan- the one hand, our knowledge about the history of guages are apportioned in a kind of complementary the structure(s) of the language is based on the data distribution. These domains are usually ranked in gathered from the corpora using Hebrew and the a hierarchy, from the highly valued (H) to the less historical setting of these texts; on the other hand, valued (L). The H language is typically used for reli- the analysis of the linguistic information in the gious, educational, literary, and other prestigious various corpora is a de facto description of the uses domains, while the L language, representing more of the different historical systems by each corpus. of the vernacular, is primarily the spoken tongue. This article will alternate between these two sys- There is some evidence to prove that Hebrew, in its tems of division as appropriate, beginning with Old later periods served in certain areas as the H lan- Hebrew as represented in the Hebrew of the biblical guage, with Aramaic and Greek as the L languages. corpus and its sub-divisions (which include Archaic For example, the core of the liturgy is in Hebrew Biblical Hebrew, Standard Biblical Hebrew, and and not in Aramaic or Greek, even in places where Late Biblical Hebrew) before proceeding to the lin- clearly either Greek or Aramaic were the common Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception vol. 11 Authenticated | [email protected] © Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, 2015 Download Date | 11/25/18 9:00 AM 639 Hebrew Language 640 language of communication. Such a distribution is Sebba). Writing systems are not usually invented to supported both by the literary material as well as transcribe sounds (see Coulmas); this was obviously the epigraphic evidence. true for hieroglyphic and cuneiform writings, but it Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal was also true for linear alphabets. Indeed, the early Hebrew writing was without vowels and even had II. Hebrew Bible/Old Testament a restricted number of consonantal graphemes that Biblical Hebrew (BH), the language of the biblical did not reflect its variety of sounds; this is most corpus that extends historically from the beginning recognizable in Classical Hebrew with the shin and of the first millennium BCE until almost its end, śin, which were originally represented by a single can best understood by contextualizing it within letter until the Masoretes added a dot to distin- the larger social and historical context of ancient guish the two sounds. Other classical phonemic dis- Israel and Judah. The terminology for describing tinctions like // and /ǵ/ both were transcribed in BH has been quite varied. Biblical Hebrew is usu- Classical Hebrew as ayin; /ḥ/ and /h˚ / were written ally separated into three periods, which can be la- with ḥet in Classical Hebrew. These examples fur- beled as Archaic Biblical Hebrew (ABH), Standard ther illustrate the simplified nature of classical He- Biblical Hebrew (SBH), and Late Biblical Hebrew brew writing. A continuation of the spoken distinc- (LBH). The description Biblical restricts Hebrew to a tion for these sounds in the Hellenistic period can specific corpus of literature, whereas the term Clas- be illustrated by the LXX transcriptions of proper sical Hebrew is less specific and can be applied more nouns (e.g., Heb. mrh, Gk. Gomorra; Heb. zh, Gk. broadly to ancient Hebrew in all its varieties during Gaza). The preservation of these pronunciations the classical periods. Classical Hebrew might include, into the Hellenistic period is evidence of the conti- e.g., Hebrew inscriptions and extend to include nuity of the Hebrew speech communities after the later Hebrew written in the Second Temple period Babylonian exile; on the other hand, the Hebrew (e.g., as utilized in the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew) writing tradition was profoundly disrupted by the in addition to (but not restricted to) Biblical He- Babylonian campaigns against Jerusalem and Judah brew. The classical period for Hebrew begins with (in 597, 586, and 581 BCE) and would result in a its emergence as a distinct language during the new literary dialect (LBH) during the Persian pe- early Iron Age (as represented especially in ABH) riod. through its use in the Second Temple period. Clas- The main source for Biblical Hebrew as we have sical Hebrew disappears when it ceased to be used received it comes from the tradition of the Masor- as a living language in Palestine following the “Bar- etes – that is, Jewish scribes who copied and trans- Kokhba” revolt against Rome in the 2nd century CE mitted the biblical text after the 7th century CE. (132–35 CE); in the next century, the codification The Masoretic scribes preserved the Hebrew conso- of the Mishnah (ca. 230 CE) marks the beginning nantal text while adding vowel signs, accents, and of a new literary phase in the Hebrew language – the marginal notes of the Masorah. The oldest Mas- Rabbinic Hebrew. oretic manuscripts are the Aleppo and Leningrad It is important to recognize that Classical He- Codices, which date to the 9th and 10th centuries brew is known from textual artifacts, whereas the CE. These manuscripts represent the Tiberian sys- typical linguistic study of languages follows pri- tem of vowels and accents dating from the 9th cen- marily speech. Extra-biblical inscriptions, or Epi- tury CE. graphic Hebrew (EH), contributes to the corpus of 1. Archaic Biblical Hebrew (ABH). The oldest textual artifacts and to a broader understanding of phase of Hebrew language is usually called Archaic Classical Hebrew.
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