Ancient Hebrew (עברית עתיקה Ivrít
atiqá) is a conventional designation for
the language in which the Hebrew Bible is composed. To be clear, not all of התנ״ך ha-Tanakh – an
acronym composed of the first letter of the titles of its successive parts: תורה Torá, נביאים Neviím, andכתובים Ketuvím – is written in Hebrew. Ezra 4:8-6:18; 7:12-26, Dan
2:4b-7:28, Jer 10:11, and a phrase in Gen 31:47 are written in ancient Aramaic
(ארמית עתיקה Aramít atiqá), the lingua franca of a cross-section of the ancient
Near East in the neo-Assyrian, neo-Babylonian, and Persian periods.
Ancient Hebrew’s primary period of
attestation covers a period of more than a thousand years, from about 1000 bce – 135 ce. Extant texts of this time frame, inclusive of, but by no
means limited to, texts preserved in the Hebrew Bible, are written on stone,
pottery, metal, papyrus, and parchment, and make use of a total of 22 graphemes
to denote up to 25 consonantal phonemes. A few graphemes, ו w, י y, ה h, andא (the
glottal stop), serve first in word-final position and later, in certain medial
contexts, to mark vowels. But even in fuller orthographies, the texts do not mark most vowels, and vowel
markers are multivalent; for example, ו covers both /o/
and /u/ vowels. For these reasons, the phonology, morphology, syntax,
and prosody of ancient Hebrew is, in varying degrees, a matter of
reconstruction. The texts also contain delimitation markers, spaces and/or
dots, separating one word and one text block from another.
Varieties of ancient Hebrew (AH) are
documented within its primary period of attestation. The corpus is alive with
linguistic variation, conditioned by factors as diverse as register, genre,
provenance, and diachrony. This is true across the texts that make up the
Tanakh, and across epigraphic epistolary texts covering the entire
chronological range, from Tel Qeiyafa, Lachish, and Arad to Bar Kochba. Another
example: the linguistic profile of the sentence literature of Proverbs differs
from that of Ben Sira as preserved in the Masada fragments; and that of Ben
Sira from that of Pirqei Avot, an example of middle Hebrew (MH) on the
other side of the artificial divide of the linguistic continuum of pre-modern
Hebrew. The diverse forms of Hebrew in which non-sectarian and sectarian
compositions found at Qumran were written are also examples of ancient Hebrew.
The Hebrew of post-biblical Jewish tradition
preserved thereafter in Jewish tradition, the Hebrew of the Mishna, Talmud,
Midrash, Piyyut, and so on, may be classified as middle Hebrew (עברית בינונית Ivrít benonít).1
Modern Hebrew (NH, “new Hebrew’) developed as a secularization of middle
Hebrew from the middle of the nineteenth century forward, and received a push
from pioneers like Eliezer ben-Yehudah. It is now the spoken and written tongue
of the state of Israel, with 8 million speakers.
The phonological detail of the Tanakh preserved
in ancient reading traditions - Palestinian, Tibero-Palestinian, and Standard Tiberian;
the Babylonian and Yemenite; in the case of the Pentateuch, the Samaritan
reading tradition; but also, what can be gathered from biblical manuscripts with plene orthography found at Qumran; phonetic transcriptions of
names and untranslated words in the LXX and larger Hellenistic Jewish tradition,
and of entire passages in fragments of the second column of Origen’s Hexapla – said detail has
roots in the pre-Hellenistic period, but nonetheless reflects developments
which occurred in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. This is the secondary
period of attestation of ancient Hebrew, in which specific reading
traditions were preserved and recorded to an ever greater extent and with ever
greater precision.
The most important Hebrew manuscripts of the
kind just mentioned, of the Tanakh or portions thereof, range in date from
about 850 to 1100 ce; for the
Samaritan Pentateuch, from about 1100 to 1400 ce.
The pinnacle of achievement within this period of attestation was attained by
the masoretic codices of the standard Tiberian tradition. Pandects that
encompassed the entire Tanakh, Codex Aleppo (ca. 915) and Codex Leningradensis
(1009) in particular, for the precision and wealth of phonological and prosodic
detail, are among the greatest linguistic artifacts of all time. The accuracy
and completeness of the reproduction of linguistic data, the inclusion of
variant readings, the panoply of marginal and end notes (in Aramaic, not
Hebrew!), is unrivaled in the history of text transmission.
Ancient Hebrew as pronounced today according
to religious and/or academic convention is emphatically not the way it was
pronounced during its primary period of attestation. The differences
occasionally rise to the level of divergent grammatical analysis. This is
undeniable once coeval sources of evidence for the pronunciation of the
language are taken into account: in particular, place names and personal names
from Judah attested in neo-Assyrian, neo-Babylonian, and late Babylonian
documents. For example: banay barqa for בני ברק benei
beraq; ḫazaqia(u) for חזקיהו ḥizqiyahu; iaua for יהוא jehu.2 On the basis of the same evidence and Greek
transcriptions, it is clear that the inventory of consonantal phonemes in
ancient Hebrew in the primary period of attestation was larger at first. ע and ח, not just ש, did
double-duty and stood for one of two possible phonemes. Nonetheless, the merger
of these phonemes, and of שׂ /ś/ to ס /s/, was well underway in the last phases of AH in the
primary period of its attestation. It is also clear that in the course of
transmission as documentable in the secondary period of its attestation, some
features of AH grammar came to be poorly understood and were less than
adequately transmitted, for example, qal passives; infinitive absolutes; paragogic
nuns; rarely, the vocalization of waw before a yiqtol. The
phonology of Tiberian Masoretic Hebrew contains within it a great number of
clues to earlier stages of ancient Hebrew phonology; nonetheless, it represents
a development away from the phonology of ancient Hebrew as known to us
from the primary period of its attestation. For example, sporadic defective
spellings of vowels occurring beyond the nucleus of the stressed syllable in
epigraphic Hebrew suggest that particular classes of verbs and nouns were
stressed in all contexts in the First Temple period as they are in Tiberian Masoretic
Hebrew in pausal position only. Thus we find וע֫ת instead of ועתה; שלח֫ת in place of שלחתי; הי֫ת instead of היתה. Other examples: insertion of an anaptyctic
vowel in final position consonant clusters and before final position pharyngeals
and laryngeals (but not the glottal stop), over against a progressive lack
thereof in earlier data, working backwards; raising of /a/ to /i/
in closed unaccented syllables, e.g. Tiberian MT מגרש migraš over
against magras (Jerome) and מזמור mizmor over
against μαζμωρ mazmor (Secunda); reduction
of /a/ to shwa in unaccented syllables, e.g. מגדו megiddo, over
against cuneiform magiddu; mutation of /i/ to /a/ in originally closed
accented syllables, e.g. גת gath over against gint
(or gimt, with partial dissimilation) in neo-Assyrian sources. Finally, evidence
from Persian period Aramaic, a language in an adstrate relationship with coeval
Hebrew then and thereafter such that features of Aramaic made their way into Hebrew
and features of Hebrew into Aramaic in communities in which both were employed,
suggests that fricativization of non-emphatic plosives (בגדכפת) in
post-vocalic position is a phenomenon which gathered steam from the Persian
period on. The weakening or elision of laryngeals/ pharyngeals and the
non-initial glottal stop, on the other hand, characterized spoken Hebrew in
some times and places far more than others, and must be considered a
possibility even in the earliest of times.
The sense of the texts in the Tanakh, the
particular nuances of words and phrases in context, the eloquence of its
rhetoric, the content of its instruction, and the poetics of its narrative,
prayer, and prophecy, all this and more is a deserving object of study and a
source of fascination for people of diverse persuasions. The language and
literature in question can now be studied against a richer linguistic
background than ever before. Whoever chooses not to study the Tanakh in
the light of what can be learned from linguistic analysis of the entire corpus
of ancient Hebrew texts, and of the corpora of extant texts in cognate
languages on top of that, is committed to a self-defeating enterprise. Whoever
chooses not to study biblical Hebrew in full awareness of the
distinction between its primary and secondary periods of attestation is doomed
to retroject elements of the latter into his understanding of the former.
1 The division of Hebrew into three parts, old, middle, and new, is in
accord with a tradition among Semitists that goes back to Gotthelf Bergsträsser
(see bibliography below).
2 Note the uncontracted diphthong in banay (so also LXX Codex B),
the norm, presumably, in First Temple Judahite; barqa points to a qatl
formation, whereas MT beraq comes across as an Aramaized version of baraq;
ḫazaqia(u)
points to a sentence name Yáhu prevailed, possibly reanalyzed as an
apocopated yiqtol + yáhu in MT Hebrew (ye)ḥizqiyahu Yáhu will prevail, or my strength is Yáhu; iaua for
יהוא
points to a sentence name He is Yah, with the long form of the 3sg
pronoun, as in Qumran Hebrew: the forms hú’a and hí’a, spelled הא in both cases
originally, may have been the norm in First Temple Judahite, analogous to héma
and héna in the 3pl. Caution is in order because of the known tendency
of proper names to fossilize earlier linguistic features.
Bibliography
Shmuel Aḥituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period (tr. and ed. Anson F. Rainey; Jerusalem: Carta, 2008) [the vocalization of the inscriptions according to the principles of Tiberian Masoretic Hebrew, however helpful to the average reader, is unscientific and without historical foundation]; Gotthelf Bergsträsser, Introduction to the Semitic Languages. Text Specimens and Grammatical Sketches (trans. with notes and bibliography and an appendix on the scripts by Peter T. Daniels; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1983 [1928]) [a classic; still worth reading]; Margaretha L. Follmer, The Aramaic Language in the Achaemenid Period. A Study in Linguistic Variation (OLA 68; Leuven: Peeters, 1995 [must background reading for those interested in the study of linguistic variation across the corpus of ancient Hebrew]: W. Randall Garr, Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine 1000-586 b.c.e. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985) [Garr distinguishes between “Northern Hebrew” (Israelite) and “Southern Hebrew” (Judahite) on pp. 38-39 and 232-235]; Takamitsu Muraoka and Bezalel Porten, “Phonology,” in A Grammar of Egyptian Aramaic. Second Revised Edition (HdO 32; Leiden: Brill, 2003) 1-42 [the problems that arise in reconstructing the phonology of ancient Aramaic in its primary period of attestation are analogous to those encountered in the case of ancient Hebrew]; Gary Rendsburg, “Ancient Hebrew Phonology,” in Phonologies of Asia and Africa (Including the Caucasus) (ed, Alan S. Kaye; technical advisor, Peter T. Daniels; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1997) 65-83 [Rendsburg’s claim that “the [standard Tiberian] Masoretic Text more or less accurately reflects the pronunciation (or at least one pronunciation) of ancient Hebrew in the first millennium b.c.e., i.e., the time of the composition of the biblical books” (68) is belied by his own exposition; it does not accurately reflect such, except through the prism of phonological developments within the biblical period (1200-100 bce) and subsequent to it, developments standard Tiberian Hebrew preserves, which is not to say that the radical reconstructions of the phonology of ancient Hebrew proposed by Zellig Harris and Klaus Beyer, respectively, are on the right track; those reconstructions err in the opposite direction by projecting elements of “proto-Semitic” onto Hebrew of the First Temple period; for the rest, Rendsburg’s assumption that varieties of ancient Hebrew beyond “standard literary Judahite Hebrew” are isolable in the extant corpus of ancient Hebrew is undoubtedly correct, but, from a methodological point of view, he has things backwards: in order to have reliable comparative data to work with, the individual linguistic profiles of discrete corpora such as Iron Age epigraphic Hebrew, Job, Song of Songs, Qohelet, Ben Sira as found in the Masada fragments, Hodayot, 4QMMT, and so on, need to be thoroughly explored, compared with each other, and compared with “standard literary Judahite Hebrew,” before idiosyncratic features within the core corpus of literary Jerusalemite Hebrew are associated with alternative dialects, “Israelian” or some other; for Rendsburg’s latest attempt to isolate "Israelian" features, see idem, “Israelian Hebrew Features in Deuteronomy 33,” in Mishneh Todah: Studies in Deuteronomy and Its Cultural Environment in Honor of Jeffrey H. Tigay (ed. Nili Sacher Fox, David A. Glatt-Gilad; and Michael J. Williams, Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009) 167-184]
In a subsequent post, I will take up the
issue of linguistic variation across the corpus of ancient Hebrew in more
detail.
Amazing post! Thanks for sharing
Posted by: Stacy | November 30, 2009 at 02:03 PM
Thank you, Stacy, for your blogging from a Muslim woman's perspective.
Posted by: JohnFH | December 01, 2009 at 08:29 AM
This doesn't help me at all I was looking for stuff about what their land looked like and what their government was like. But, no I read all of this to find it's not what I wanted
Posted by: lu | December 07, 2009 at 04:24 PM
Thanks for this definition of Ancient Hebrew. It might be useful to your readers to offer a similar definition of "Archaic Hebrew", which is often used to designate some elements of Biblical (or Ancient) Hebrew which are not easily explained, and therefore often lumped together and claimed to be archaic.
Posted by: Hebrew Scholar | December 14, 2009 at 09:28 AM
I'm not sure it's possible to speak of texts written in "Archaic Hebrew," though it stands to reason, on non-linguistic grounds (for example, considerations relative to the history of the religion of Israel), that texts like Deut 32 and Judg 5 contain "archaic Hebrew" features.
Posted by: JohnFH | December 14, 2009 at 11:52 AM