The Beginnings
of the Hebrew Language
It's difficult to
pinpoint the moment Hebrew emerged as a unique language.
By Angel Saenz-Badillos
Reprinted from A
History of the Hebrew Language with the permission of Cambridge
University Press.
Within Biblical Hebrew itself, subdivisions can be made
according to the period or stage of the language. The earliest Hebrew texts
that have reached us date from the end of the second millennium B.C.E. The
Israelite tribes that settled in Canaan from the 14th to 13th centuries
B.C.E.--regardless of what their language might have been before they
established themselves there--used Hebrew as a spoken and a literary language
until the fall of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E.
It is quite likely that during the First Temple period
[1006-587 B.C.E.] there would have been significant differences between the
spoken and the written language, although this is hardly something about which
we can be exact. What we know as Biblical Hebrew is without doubt basically a
literary language, which until the Babylonian exile [following the fall of
Jerusalem] existed alongside living, spoken, dialects.
The exile marks the disappearance of this language from
everyday life and its subsequent use for literary and liturgical purposes only
during the Second Temple period [515 B.C.E.-70 CE]. The latest biblical texts
date from the second century B.C.E., if we disregard Biblical Hebrew's survival
in a more or less artificial way in the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, and in
certain kinds of medieval literature.
The Hebrew of the poetic sections of the Bible, some of
which are very old despite possible post‑exilic revision, as well as the
oldest epigraphic material in inscriptions dating from the 10th to sixth
centuries B.C.E., we call Archaic Hebrew, although we realize that there is no
general agreement among scholars regarding this term.The language used in the
prose sections of the Pentateuch and in the Prophets and the Writings before
the exile we call Classical Biblical Hebrew, or Biblical Hebrew proper. Late
Biblical Hebrew refers to the language of the books of the Bible written after
the exile.
It has often been stated that Biblical Hebrew is not a
language in the full sense of the word but merely a "fragment of
language," only a part of the language actually used by the Israelites
prior to the exile. This is without doubt one of the most serious limitations
for an adequate study of its history. Ten centuries ago, the Jews of Spain were
fully conscious of this, as demonstrated by the words of some Cordoban
scholars: "Had we not left our country as exiles, we should today possess
the whole of our language as in former times."
The approximately 8,000 lexical items preserved in the books
of the Bible would not have been enough to meet the needs of a living language.
The Origins of Hebrew
The historical problem of the origins of Hebrew--sometimes
raised as a question of the kind "What was the language spoken by the
Patriarchs?" or "What was the language of the conquerors of
Canaan?"--is beyond the scope of this study, which is concerned only with
more narrowly linguistic issues. Whatever the truth of the matter, we have to
recognize that the exact beginnings of the Hebrew language are still surrounded
by mystery.
From the moment of its appearance in a documented written
form, Hebrew offers clear evidence that it belongs to the Canaanite group of
languages, with certain peculiarities of its own. Possibly this means that when
the Israelite tribes settled in Canaan they adopted the language of that
country, at least for their written documents. Ancient, and certainly
anachronistic, traditions about these semi‑nomads allude to Aramaean
ancestors (see Deuteronomy 26:5), but inferences of a linguistic nature should
not, in principle, be drawn from this.
In the passage where Jacob and his descendants are portrayed
as making a final break from Laban (the Aramaean, Genesis 31:47), various
writers have seen an allusion to the time when the Israelites abandoned Aramaic
and adopted the Canaanite language of the country they were living in.
In any case, there is a clear continuity between Hebrew as
it is historically attested and the language of the El‑Amarna letters
[cuneiform tablets discovered in 1887], which date from before the settlement
of the Israelites in Canaan. This is not to deny that Israel's monotheism could
have had clear implications for particular semantic fields, thus distinguishing
Hebrew from the languages of other Canaanite peoples.
Combining historical and linguistic issues, it was suggested
in the first decades of this century that Hebrew is not a homogeneous
linguistic system but a Mischsprache [hybrid language], in which it is
possible to distinguish an early Canaanite layer, very close to Akkadian, and
another more recent layer, closer to Aramaic and Southern Semitic…
As well as modified versions of the Mischsprache hypothesis which continued to receive a measure of
support until recently, there have also been claims by various scholars, often
led by considerations of an allegedly historical nature, that clear traces of
Aramaic can be found in the origins of Hebrew. However, the various rebuttals
of the Mischsprache theory have
ensured that it is no longer generally regarded as very plausible nowadays, and
a different kind of approach to the problems which fuelled the theory is
favored.
Various recent studies have emphasized that Aramaic might
have influenced Hebrew very strongly, not when Hebrew first emerged but many
centuries later, in the second half of the first millennium B.C.E. up to the
beginnings of the Common Era. Thus, it is generally accepted that in the
phonology [sound], morphology [structure], and lexicon [vocabulary] of Late
Biblical Hebrew, as well as in Rabbinic Hebrew, there is a significant Aramaic
component.
Similarly, in the linguistic system of the Masoretes [sages
who lived between the sixth and 10th century and were responsible for
establishing a system of vowels for the consonants-only Bible] features of
Aramaic pronunciation have been superimposed on Hebrew.
If, in various ways, we recognize in Hebrew elements that
differentiate it from the neighboring Canaanite dialects, we do not believe
that these are derived from the Aramaic or Amorite that the Israelites might
perhaps have spoken before they settled in Canaan, but instead that they
result, for example, from linguistic conservativism, from independent
linguistic developments within Hebrew, and from dialect diversity (about which
we are acquiring ever more evidence).
Increasingly it is believed that whereas Biblical Hebrew was
the language of literature and administration, the spoken language even before
the exile might have been an early version of what would later become Rabbinic
Hebrew. There are notable differences between the type of language used for
poetry (which seems to be closer to the languages found in neighboring
countries) and that employed by classical prose, as well as differences between
the northern and southern or Jerusalemite dialects. A further significant
feature is the influence of various foreign languages on Hebrew over the
centuries.
Dr. Angel Saenz-Badillos is Professor of Hebrew Language
and Literature at Universidad Complutense, Madrid.
(c) Cambridge University Press 1993.
