The Use of the Participle in the Hebrew Bar Kosiba Letters in the Light of Aramaic

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THE USE OF THE PARTICIPLE IN THE HEBREW BAR KOSIBA LETTERS IN THE LIGHT OF ARAMAIC

HOLGER GZELLA Leiden University

Even though Simon Bar Kosiba’s political ambitions were doomed to failure, he eventually seems to have revolutionized, albeit long post mortem, people’s views on the linguistic situation in Palestine around the time of Christ. Earlier scholars usually believed that Hebrew as a living language had died out completely soon after the Babylonian Exile; in 1960, however, the caves of Wadi MurabbaÆat, Nahal Hever and Nahal Seelim in the Judaean Desert yielded a number of letters either from himself or from his executives during the upheaval (132–135 CE).1 Several of them are written not in Aramaic or Greek, but in a previously unknown variety of Hebrew; seven Hebrew letters have been preserved sufﬁciently well to permit a wider-ranging linguistic investigation. This discovery quickly brought about a change of the majority opinion towards an acceptance (by now almost unan- imous) of the view that the use of Hebrew was not limited to learned circles, but that it was still a “spoken language” in that time—what- ever the intrinsically vague term “spoken language” is in fact supposed to mean.2 Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Aramaic became very much dominant and thereby also exercised a growing influence on Hebrew from the ﬁfth century BCE onwards. This has by now been shown in great detail with respect to morphology and lexicon.3

1 Text and sigla cited according to: A. Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic, Hebrew and Nabataean Documentary Texts from the Judaean Desert and Related Material (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 2000). 2 For a very comprehensive and useful survey of the relevant literature see W.F. Smelik, The Targum of Judges (Leiden: Brill, 1995) 1–23. Still many scholars think that the publication of the letters conﬁrmed M.Z. Segal’s view of Rabbinic Hebrew as a later, living development of Biblical Hebrew, rather than Geiger’s opinion that it was an artiﬁcial language; cf. E.Y. Kutscher, A History of the Hebrew Language (Jeru- salem: Magnes Press, 1982) 117–18. 3 Cf. the meticulous remarks by K. Beyer, Die aramäischen Texte vom Toten Meer

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A re-examination of the evidence indicates that there is still room for discussion, nurturing the hope that some day the linguistic status of Hebrew in Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Palestine can be defined more precisely. Presumably, this enterprise will entail the use of linguistic models beyond the traditional polar alternative of a “spoken” versus an “extinct” language, as the latter may actually prove to be a dead end: language death is a gradual phenomenon allowing for many intermediate stages, including unexpected revivals, and languages can still be “spoken” under certain circumstances even if no native speak- ers exist anymore. For the time being, the usual arguments in favour of a considerable Aramaic influence, too, require some fine-tuning: the source-language from which alleged loans spring, such as the analyt- ical genitive construction instead of the construct state, usually cannot be further determined within the chronologically and geographically huge Aramaic dialect continuum. They are thus unable to answer a central question: what kind of Aramaic is in the background? Moreover, many foreign words and forms are restricted to certain very specific contexts, especially legal terminology. The suffix /-eh/ for the third person masculine singular, for example, is typical of the Aramaic languages in general. However, in, e.g., Mur 42 it only occurs in various stereotypical statements at the end of the letter, that is, in the fixed formulae /ka˚a‰eh/ “he has dictated it” (Mur 42:8–9) and in the Aramaic expression /Æal na9p·eh/ “he is obliged to keep the contract” (Mur 42:10). The body of the text, by contrast, has the gen- uinely Hebrew form /l¨/ (Mur 42:6). Hence, the use of /-eh/ in these two examples does not prove “Aramaic influence” on the language of the letters as such, but rather indicates the impact of an existing legal and administrative tradition in Aramaic from which set phrases of this kind were taken over. One may compare this to legal terminology in many Western languages which still depends on Latin technical expressions; the mere existence of such expressions does not prove that the people using them had an active command of Latin. In fact, many instances of borrowing along these lines are inconclusive for determining whether language contact between Hebrew and Aramaic

II (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004) 34–36 (general) and 261–62 (concern- ing the Hebrew texts from the Judaean Desert). Beyer is one of the very few scholars nowadays who hold that Hebrew has ceased being people’s native language soon after the exile. Note that he does not say that it was never “spoken” afterwards (his critics in this respect should indeed read him more carefully).