By Charles Halton on Wednesday, 5 April 2006 at 2:47 pm
Mats Eskhult of the Uppsala University provides the last essay in the forum reproduced in Hebrew Studies. Eskhult asserts that there are clear points of linguistic development in biblical Hebrew and that these developments indicate two separate time periods in which the Old Testament was written. Some of the developments that he highlights are: vocabulary usage particular to certain time periods, the diminishing “oral flavor” or narratives in late Hebrew through greater use of indirect speech vs. direct speech in early Hebrew, the participle taking over the function of yiqtol to indicate present tense in late Hebrew, the use of hyh + participle that “has full verbal force,” and the definite article used as a relative pronoun in late Hebrew.
Most scholars agree that there is a certain amount of development within the language of the Old Testament–the question is whether to interpret this as two forms of the language in simultaneous use (the older form of the language being the more literary or formal register while the later form is closer to the “language on the street”) or whether these forms were spoken in different time periods and reveals a scheme with which we can use to assign relative dates to texts.
Eskhult states that even when late authors tried to mimick the language of early texts, they were not able to do so adequately:
Authors of late books had to take pains to understand the coplicated system of tense, aspect, and modality in the earlier literature. They apparently lacked competence in handling the complex system of verbal syntax the old way, and, what is more, their current vernacular had developed other strategies to express these categories.
Therefore, traces of the development of the language remain in the text and allow us to assign broad, relative dates to texts Old Testament texts.
The which ever conclusion you come to will largely depend upon your presuppositions, but I think there is evidence from the limited inscriptional evidence to show that “early” and “late” Hebrew were used in different time periods that correspond to the “pre-” and “post-exilic” periods.
What do you think?
Comments (1)
Category: All,Biblical Hebrew Language
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Comment by Kevin A. Wilson
Made Wednesday, 5 of April , 2006 at 5:29 pm
I think most scholars would agree that there are two period: Standard Biblical Hebrew (SBH) and Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH). The debate is over where we date the switch between the two.
I think the exile is the earliest point at which the change would be made, but it didn’t necessarily happen at that point. It certainly happened by 400, but it didn’t necessarily happen that late. That leaves us almost two centuries during which the change could happen. Not only is 200 years a long time, but these happen to be a rather important 200 years.
Many of the texts that we have trouble dating fall within that time period. This is especially important for me, since I am working on the last layers of the Pentateuch. If we could determine the time of the change from SBH to LBH, that might help me date H and the H redactor.
