A Social History of Hebrew: Its Origins Through the Rabbinic Period
A Social History of Hebrew: Its Origins Through the Rabbinic Period
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300199109 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/28/2013 |
| Series: | The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Social History of Hebrew
ITS ORIGINS THROUGH THE RABBINIC PERIOD
By WILLIAM M. SCHNIEDEWIND
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Yale UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-17668-1
CHAPTER 1
Language, Land, and People: Toward the History of Classical Hebrew These are the descendants of Shem according to their families, their languages, their lands, and their nations.
—Genesis 10:31
As I finish this book, I recall a public lecture I attended one evening at a prestigious private university. After the lecture, a few students gathered around an eminent scholar of Semitic languages, who casually commented, "I am only interested in the languages, not the people who spoke them." I was a young graduate student back then, and I no longer recall either the lecture or the exact topic of the conversation that prompted the remark. But I still remember those words and my sense of stunned amazement. I had thought that the purpose of studying obscure ancient languages was to understand the people, their societies, and their cultures. Little did I know that I would eventually be writing this book arguing for a close relationship between the early history of the Jewish people and the Hebrew language. This book contends that language does not stand apart from the social history of its people. Language and writing are part of a cultural system, and the early history of the Hebrew language is closely tied to the early history of the Jewish people.
Of course, my sense of amazement about the separation between the study of languages and the people who speak them was really a function of my own ignorance. The well-known linguistic anthropologist Alessandro Duranti points out that this distinction is typical of the formal approach to linguistic analysis: "In general, phonologists, morphologists, and syntacticians are more interested in the relationship among different elements of the linguistic system (sounds, parts of words, phrases and sentences) than in the relationship between such elements and the 'world out there' that such a system is meant to represent." This disjunction between languages and their speakers takes the study of language out of context. As Duranti observes, "It is hence a very abstract and removed Homo sapiens that is being studied by most formal grammarians, not the kids in a Philadelphia neighborhood or the orators of Ghana." Likewise, it has often been a disembodied Hebrew that scholars have studied, as if the history of the Hebrew language were somehow unrelated to the social history of the prophets and poets, scribes and priests who penned the ancient Hebrew language.
This book has two propositions that guide it and give it a unique perspective on the history of the Hebrew language. First, it begins with the premise that the ancient Hebrew language was part of the social fabric of the people living in the ancient eastern Mediterranean. This hardly seems like a revolutionary statement. Language is constrained by its role as a communication device. We do not talk to ourselves—at least we are not supposed to. A language is conditioned by the movements of social life—the vicissitudes of war and peace, the inroads of nationalism and imperialism, the upheavals of urbanization and immigration, and the ebb and flow of economic tides. As such, the history of a language mirrors the history of the people who speak it—or, in our present case, the people who wrote our texts. Languages take their cues from the social life of peoples and nations. As Edward Sapir put it, "The history of language and the history of culture move along parallel lines." They move along parallel lines because they are part of the same cultural system. The history of Hebrew is no exception. Classical Hebrew was intimately connected to the life of the people. The ancient Hebrew language was both socially conditioned and socially constrained.
Second, this book is shaped by the linguistics of writing, that is, the record of Hebrew in textual artifacts, rather than by the linguistics of speech, that is, the piecing together of the phonology of ancient Hebrew speakers. The study of Semitic languages, including Hebrew, has had an extraordinary focus on phonology, in spite of the problematic relationship between writing and speech as well as the inability to speak with native informants (except perhaps in a séance, as Saul and the witch of Endor did with Samuel!). Thus, this book focuses on the early history of Hebrew as a written language.
The Scope of This Book
The scope of this book is limited in a variety of ways. First of all, it focuses upon the history of ancient Hebrew as a writing system. The early history of the Hebrew language is, in some respects, the history of a writing system. As such, it is interested in questions that arise from the linguistics of textual artifacts, such as spelling, script, scchools, and language standardization. It also tackles the problem of the relationship of wrriting to speech, while discussing the formidable problems encountered when trying to relatttte written artifacts to vernacular language. We can only guess how ancient Hebrew actually sounded, and scholars have tended to have rather romantic notions about the relationship between ancient writing systems and the sounds of these ancient languages. As the linguist Florian Coulmas has pointed out, "All phonographic writing systems, however refined and concerned with language-specific phonetic detail, omit great numbers of phonetic distinctions." This book, then, will focus on the changes in the writing system and not on the phonetics of Hebrew.
At the same time, this book is concerned with the history of Hebrew as a vernacular. To be sure, there is no direct evidence for vernacular Hebrew. Obviously, there are no live informants. The written text is only indirect evidence for spoken Hebrew. But we can reconstruct aspects of the social life of the ancient Israelites who spoke Hebrew, what linguistic anthropologists call the "speech community." Observations about the history of the speech community can lend great insight to the social history of the language, even if they do not tell us the exact pronunciation of the letter [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (is it sh or s or some variant thereof?) or exactly when the Canaanite shift (that is, /a/ > /o/) took place. This book will adapt the linguistic idea of the speech community to the type of evidence that we have, namely, written texts that were generated by a scribal community. The history of early Hebrew thus must be shaped first of all by understanding the history of the Hebrew scribal community (or communities) and secondarily by the history of the Hebrew speech community.
It should now be clear that this book will not be a traditional history of the Hebrew language. That is, this is not a history of the Hebrew language focusing primarily on the traditional linguistic categories of speech (for example, phonology, morphology). That has been done before, most recently by Angel Sáenz-Badillos, by Mireille Hadas-Lebel, and by E. Y. Kutscher's important, though incomplete, History of the Hebrew Language. Several older works also cover aspects of the history of Hebrew. Bauer and Leander, Sperber, and several others have contributed historical grammars of biblical Hebrew. Those looking for a more complete description of phonetic and morphological developments in the Hebrew language must consult these other works. The present work aims more at understanding the relationship between the social life of the people in Canaan and the evolution of the Hebrew language. My approach is perhaps most influenced by my teacher Chaim Rabin. In his brief but brilliant little book A Short History of the Hebrew Language, he describes the sociology of the Hebrew language, introducing us to the interplay between the Hebrew language and the history of the Jewish people. Rabin's work is now out of print and out of date, and it is so brief that it only tantalizes. There have been many attempts to popularize the history of the Hebrew language for a more general audience. The best examples of this are Edward Horowitz's old classic How the Hebrew Language Grew and Joel Hoffman's more recent book In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. Yet, these works do not offer the broad historical survey of the Hebrew language as part of a cultural system, which I seek to reconstruct here.
Chronologically, this book is a social history of Hebrew from its emergence as a language in ancient Canaan until its disappearance as a regularly spoken language in Roman Palestine in about 200 C.E. Rabbinic Hebrew (RH) is the last gasp of Hebrew as a living language in Palestine. Though Hebrew itself had ceased to be spoken by 200 C.E., the Mishnah was codified about 230 C.E. The term Mishnaic Hebrew (MH) is sometimes used as an alternative to Rabbinic Hebrew, but this term also has its deficiencies. Usually Mishnaic Hebrew privileges the Mishnah, even though the corpus of early rabbinic texts is much larger; furthermore, it focuses on textual artifacts rather than the cultural context with which I am trying to connect the Hebrew language. Indeed, scholars have described the two stages of Rabbinic Hebrew (that is, RH1 and RH2) as comprising an earlier period (RH1, or Tannaitic Hebrew), continuing through the second century C.E. when Hebrew was still regularly spoken, and a later period (RH2, or Amoraic Hebrew), at which stage Hebrew was essentially a literary language. Judging by the Bar Kokhba letters (132–135 C.E.), it would seem that the daily use of spoken Hebrew was already in sharp decline during the first centuries of the Common Era. Ultimately, Hebrew was uprooted from Palestine and accompanied the Jewish people throughout their wanderings until it found its way back to the Promised Land in the late nineteenth century C.E. As Sáenz-Badillos recognized, medieval Hebrew (as this stage is broadly termed) is much less clearly defined than are earlier stages. This results from medieval Hebrew's eclectic dependence on various earlier stages of the language, the use of Hebrew primarily as a literary language, and the great variety of geographic and historical settings in which Hebrew was employed (for example, France, Spain, North Africa, Persia). These later stages in the social history of Hebrew have already been the subject of some sociolinguistic scrutiny and are beyond the scope of the present work.
Inasmuch as this book is concerned with the nexus between language, land, and people, it has struggled with terminology. The terms that we use, like Israel or Palestine, are often loaded with modern political or religious baggage that is really outside the scope and interests of this book. I endeavor to use terms apolitically. One particularly interesting problem is the word for "people": What shall we call the people living in Judah /Yehud/Palestine from the Iron Age through the Roman period? There is only one Hebrew term, yhwdy /yehudî/, which might be translated as "Yehudite," "Judean," or "Jew," reflecting the different eras of the people in the land. Typically, scholars might use the term Jew to refer to the Jewish people after the Bar Kokhba revolt (that is, after 135 C.E.). Some scholars might extend the use of the term to the people in the late Second Temple period, but would resist using Jew to refer to the Iron Age people living in and around Jerusalem. The distinctions make some historical sense, but they do not accord with the fact that there is just one Hebrew term. Moreover, one might question what makes the use of the term Jew acceptable for both 200 C.E. and 2000 C.E., but not for 200 C.E. and 200 B.C.E. Are "Jews" in 2000 and 200 C.E. more similar than in 200 C.E. and 200 B.C.E.? Moreover, the use of the same term by the ancient speech community created a sense of identity between the ancient "Jews" living in the Iron Age, the "Jews" living in the Second Temple period, and the "Jews" of late antiquity. A social anthropologist might even call this sense of identity "fictive kinship," but it is nevertheless reinforced by language and metalanguage (that is, the use of one Hebrew term, yhwdy /yehudî/). For the purposes of this book, I wish to emphasize the linguistic connection between yhwdy, yhwdh, and yhwdyt—that is, the terms used for people, land, and language. It is not a coincidence that the linguistic nexus between people and language is broken after the Bar Kokhba revolt, when the Jews no longer lived in "Judah /Judea" and began using the term 'bryt, "Hebrew," to refer to their language. In other words, the metalanguage for Hebrew closely follows the social history.
I call the language discussed in this book classical Hebrew. This is a much broader description than biblical Hebrew, which refers to the Hebrew represented in biblical texts. By classical Hebrew, I mean to refer to the Hebrew used during the classical period of history in Canaan, from the origins of the Jewish people until the dispersions of the early centuries of the Common Era. Thus, classical Hebrew subsumes several other Hebrew dialects, including biblical Hebrew, Qumran Hebrew, Epigraphic Hebrew, and early Rabbinic Hebrew. I will also utilize the standard chronological distinction within biblical Hebrew, namely, Archaic Biblical Hebrew (ABH), Standard Biblical Hebrew (SBH), and Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH).
The use of classical to refer to the entire scope of written Hebrew from biblical through Rabbinic Hebrew certainly broadens classical Hebrew out of its traditional constraints. I think, however, that it is important to recognize the aspects of continuity in spoken and written Hebrew over this time span, even though the Babylonian exile resulted in a major disjunction in the scribal institutions that produced Hebrew texts as well as the speech community that used Hebrew in ancient Judah. It is the continuity of Hebrew as a spoken and evolving language, in spite of the social and demographic disjunctions resulting from the Babylonian invasions and deportations, that justifies a more inclusive definition of classical Hebrew. Indeed, a broader definition of classical Hebrew has already been employed, for example, by The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew. This dictionary, however, does not include Rabbinic Hebrew—apparently for practical considerations. Its editor nevertheless boasts that his dictionary "does not restrict itself to, or privilege in any way, those ancient Hebrew texts found in the Bible." Although a broader definition of classical Hebrew is commendable, the exclusion of the Mishnaic texts is given no linguistic rationale. The definition of classical Hebrew as spanning the period when Hebrew was a living, spoken language in a defined locale is a defensible linguistic definition that must include the first stage of Rabbinic Hebrew. More specifically, I will narrow the geographic region of this social history of Hebrew to the region of Judah /Yehud/Palestine. These three terms—Judah, Yehud, and Palestine—are the historical terms used in antiquity by the Jews themselves, the Persians, and the Romans for the territory centered around Jerusalem. The use of classical Hebrew arises in the kingdom of Judah at the end of the second millennium B.C.E. and declines in the province of Roman Palestina (Palestine) by 200 C.E.
It is worth reflecting on the question of who defines the scope of a language. How are languages classified and categorized? Languages are usually defined by politics, historical circumstance, or deeply held ideologies. Thus, a language like "Chinese" is defined as one language by politics (as well as a unifying script that is promulgated by a government), in spite of the fact that the dialects of Mandarin and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible. On the other hand, a language like Serbo-Croatian has been redefined as two languages—Serbian and Croatian—as a result of historical and political events. One may ask whether Flemish and Dutch are one language or two. Here, it is important to recognize that all language classification is shaped by linguistic ideologies. For example, the description of Chinese as one language with several dialects, and of Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish as three languages is more a reflex of nationalism and borders than the conclusion of descriptive linguistics. As the sociolinguists Judith Irvine and Susan Gal observe, "Linguistic ideologies are held not only by the immediate participants in a local sociolinguistic system. They are also held by other observers, such as the linguists and ethnographers who have mapped the boundaries of languages and peoples, and provided descriptive accounts of them."
We return now to our specific topic: Who has defined "classical Hebrew" as it has been understood in scholarship? Classical Hebrew has usually been synonymous with biblical Hebrew. This narrow definition of classical Hebrew has emerged, at least in part, as a result of the work of Christian theologians, who organized the rubric of classical Hebrew according to the classical period of Jewish history as they defined it. Thus, classical Hebrew has usually excluded Rabbinic or Mishnaic Hebrew, which belonged to the next era of history—the period after Christianity's decisive break with Judaism. Many medieval Jewish grammarians, in contrast, emphasized the continuity of the Hebrew language. No doubt this reflected, in part, the Jewish sense of historical continuity that is evident from ancient times. Consider, for example, a central social institution like the Passover commemoration or the oral tradition (see Exod. 13:14; m. Avot 1:1). Even though Hebrew itself ceased to be spoken as an everyday language by sometime in the third or fourth century C.E., Hebrew continued to be used as the language of sacred literature and even served as a trade language among Jews throughout the Diaspora. To be fair, the categories of classical and Rabbinic Hebrew were also shaped by the configuration of our sources. Until relatively recently, the main corpora of ancient Hebrew literature were the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) and rabbinic literature, with a considerable chronological gap between them. The discovery of a growing corpus of ancient Hebrew inscriptions as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls now invites us to redefine classical Hebrew in much broader terms.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Social History of Hebrew by WILLIAM M. SCHNIEDEWIND. Copyright © 2013 Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
List of Abbreviations xii
1 Language, Land, and People: Toward the History of Classical Hebrew 1
2 The Origins of Hebrew: In Search of the Holy Tongue 27
3 Early Hebrew Writing 51
4 Linguistic Nationalism and the Emergence of Hebrew 73
5 The Democratization of Hebrew 99
6 Hebrew in Exile 126
7 Hebrew under Imperialism 139
8 Hebrew in the Hellenistic World 164
9 The End and the Beginning of Hebrew 191
10 Epilogue 204
Notes 209
Bibliography 231
Index 257