AMORAIC HEBREW IN THE LIGHT OF BEN SIRA’S LINGUISTIC INNOVATIONS

HAIM DIHI Beer-Sheva

We can divide the linguistic innovations in Ben Sira into two groups: (1) those that are common to Ben Sira and the later books of the Bible and/or the Dead Sea Scrolls and/or the Mishnaic literature and/or Ara- maic; (2) those that are unique to Ben Sira. Some of the latter may be ascribed to the author’s uncommon linguistic gifts and to the literary genre of his work—wisdom literature—which makes use of poetic fea- tures, including parallelism, meter, rhyme, and alliteration. It seems to be only a matter of chance that none of his other unique coinages are found only in Ben Sira. In the present lecture, I wish to focus exclusively on the linguistic inno- vations common to Ben Sira and Amoraic literature. Let me stress from the outset that these innovations appear in the latter quite independently and not as part of citations from, or within paraphrases of Ben Sira. The language of the Amoraim, unlike that of the , has not been widely studied. Breuer, for example, emphasizes that “The Hebrew of the Amoraim, which strongly inuenced the development of the , has not been sufciently studied; this is especially true of Amoraic Hebrew as preserved in the Babylonian .”1

————  I would like to thank Prof. D. Talshir and Prof. H. Cohen, who read the manuscript and offered helpful suggestions. 1 Y. Breuer, “On the Hebrew Dialect of the Amoraim in the Babylonian Talmud,” Language Studies 2–3 [1987], 127. The major studies of Amoraic language include the following: E. Y. Kutscher, “Some Problems of the Lexicography of Mishnaic Hebrew and Its Comparison with Biblical Hebrew”, Archive of the New Dictionary of 1 (1972), 29–82, 54–65; M. Sokoloff, “The Hebrew of Bereshit Rabba According to MS Vat. Ebr. 30,” Lšonénu 33 (1969), 25–42, 135–149, 270–279; Y. Breuer, The Babylonian Talmudic Hebrew According to the Manuscripts of Tractate Pesahim (Jerusalem, 2003). For other studies of Amoraic language see Y. Breuer, Tractate Pesahim, p. 1 n. 4. 16 HAIM DIHI

The pioneers in the study of this dialect—notably Kutscher and Sokoloff—reached the conclusion that it was a dead literary language that did not experience the changes and developments typical of a living idiom. According to these scholars, Amoraic Hebrew continued the lite- rary traditions of the dialects that preceded it, chiey biblical and Tannaitic Hebrew. They also emphasized the prominent inuence of , the spoken vernacular of the Amoraim, on their Hebrew.2 A watershed in research about the nature of Amoraic Hebrew are the two studies by Breuer.3 Breuer presents evidence of linguistic innovations that reect natural internal development of the language. Some of these innovations occur occasionally in the language of the Tannaim, while others make their rst appearance in Amoraic Hebrew. With regard to the former, Breuer asks whether they really were rst used by the Tannaim and then became widespread in the Amoraic age, or whether they penetrated the language of the tannaim only in a later stage of the redaction.4 Amoraic Hebrew innovations that have no parallel in Tannaitic Hebrew and that cannot be explained as the result of Aramaic inuence (in some cases even when there is a parallel in Aramaic they are not necessarily inuenced by that language) indicate, as stated above, internal development of the sort typical of living rather than dead languages. On the basis of these ndings, Breuer offers two possibilities: (1) Amoraic Hebrew was a spoken language, to some unknown extent; (2) in some cir- cumstances, the natural internal developments that are characteristic of a living idiom may take place in a dead language as well. In my lecture today, as I have already noted, I want to discuss espe- cially those innovations that are common only to Ben Sira and Amoraic Hebrew (and, in one case, to Dead Sea Scrolls Hebrew as well). It is parti- cularly important to note that these innovations do not occur in later Aramaic (Western, Eastern, or other dialects) or in late biblical Hebrew.

———— 2 On the inuence of Aramaic see Kutscher, “Lexicography,” 55; Sokoloff, “Bereshit Rabba,” 297. 3 Breuer, “The Hebrew of the Amoraim,” 127–153; Breuer, Tractate Pesahim. 4 Consider for example the word . It occurs only once in Tannaitic literature (according to the evidence of the texts), but is very common in the Babylonian Talmud. In Tannaitic literature and the , we nd instead. Breuer (“The Hebrew of the Amoraim,” 129–132) asks whether this unique occurrence in Tannaitic literature is an authentic feature of this dialect or whether it was interpolated at a later stage of textual transmission.