B-Hebrew: The Biblical Hebrew Forum

And let's not forget an important example of ancient languages used communicatively in cinema: Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ. All of the dialogue in the film is in Aramaic and Latin. Now granted, there are some issues. There should also have been Greek in the film. I believe Jesus was also a Hebrew speaker, so that could have been used. And, given what history records of Pilate, particularly from Josephus, it seems unlikely he would have spoken any Aramaic. (Josephus indicated that Pilate hated and despised Jews, as shown by his actions.) Pilate more realistically would have spoken Greek to the crowd at Jesus' trial. And the interview with Jesus would have been done in Greek, in my opinion.

Nevertheless, I applaud the effort at linguistic realism, and the effort to use ancient tongues to communicate. I understand a sequel is planned. Maybe it will fix the issues I mentioned.

talmid56 wrote:I myself have exchanged some emails in BH with people, including some on this forum. I readily admit they were more competent in the language, certainly in composition, than I. Nevertheless, communication took place. A conversation of sorts. I've also had a habit for several years of speaking Biblical Hebrew to family pets. If they could have responded in Hebrew, those would have been conversations. We'll call them half conversations.

As for the Latin and Greek, I've done that too. For about three years now, until the covid crisis came, I had regular short conversations in Latin with a friend at church services. I've also done some text-based chats in Ancient Greek and exchanged some emails in that language. Did I make mistakes? Of course. I also worked at correcting and learning from them. Both experience and research in language acquisition (I've done both) show that language mastery is greatly helped by learning to communicate in the language. This is so even if the main goal, or main opportunity for using the skills, is with reading. I've worked with four living languages (French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese). In each case i achieved good reading comprehension after I started learning to communicate in the language, not before. I don't claim this is the only way to do it. But, it is a good way, even if you just do it a little.

I realize that the path to doing this with an ancient language is more difficult. No question there. But, difficult is not the same as impossible. Though I haven't had the honor of serving in the military, I like this military motto: "The difficult we do immediately. The impossible just takes a little longer."

By way of comparison, do you have any experience with modern Hebrew or with any Hebrew beyond the period of the biblical texts? Anything that could have colored your knowledge of the language or made it "non-biblical" (as one is like to state)?

@JasonHare wrote:

By way of comparison, do you have any experience with modern Hebrew or with any Hebrew beyond the period of the biblical texts? Anything that could have colored your knowledge of the language or made it "non-biblical" (as one is like to state)?

No, I only started learning a little modern Hebrew some ten years after my first attempts at BH conversation/composition. I put it aside to concentrate on the ancient language. I just recently took it up again. So I would say, no, there was no influence from modern Hebrew at all. Unless you count the word חָתוּל, "cat". That isn't Biblical, but it is ancient even though it is used in MH. The word is found in the Talmud (see Jastrow, here: http://www.tyndalearchive.com/TABS/Jastrow//.)

Isn't חָתוּל the Latin catulus?

Isaac Fried, Boston University

Well, it's related. As I understand it, catulus is a diminutive, equivalent to the English "kitten" or "kitty". The non-diminutive form is cattus. The more literary form is feles (used in English scientific terms, as in feles domestica; also related is English "feline"). However, my understanding is that the Hebrew form is not diminutive. But, since I know little Rabbinic Hebrew, I could be wrong about that.

Interestingly, I first learned the Latin catulus when reading the Latin translation of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. It is used to refer to Alice's pet kittens.

Edit: At first I mistakenly wrote felis, the Latin genitive form for "cat" above. Now corrected to feles, the nominative, and the lexicon headword form. Mea culpa; lapsus calami (aut memoriae!) feci. (My fault; I made a slip of the pen [or memory!]).

Wiktionary says that Latin catulus is diminutive of canis "dog" rather than of "cat." Either way, I'm not sure why I thought חָתוּל was a biblical word. Odd.

I remember hearing that it was derived from the idea of wrapping up, like in this verse:

Ezekiel 16:4
וּמוֹלְדוֹתַ֗יִךְ בְּי֙וֹם הוּלֶּ֤דֶת אֹתָךְ֙ לֹֽא־כָרַּ֣ת שָׁרֵּ֔ךְ וּבְמַ֥יִם לֹֽא־רֻחַ֖צְתְּ לְמִשְׁעִ֑י וְהָמְלֵ֙חַ֙ לֹ֣א הֻמְלַ֔חַתְּ וְהָחְתֵּ֖ל לֹ֥א חֻתָּֽלְתְּ׃

It's also where we get the word חִתּוּלִים "diapers."

Lewis-Short also say it is a puppy, though saying that it is diminutive of catus, which they say is a male cat. Strange.

First a note on Gesenius:

Gesenius was one of the founders of the school of thought later made famous as the JEPD theory, a theory developed and tweaked but still taught today in a modern iteration. That theory is only a small part of a much larger Weltanschauung that I see as often leading to poor scholarship. One of the central themes of that Weltanschauung is a belief in evolution, which led Gesenius to an over-reliance on cognate languages, including DSS to modern Israeli Hebrews, for a study of Biblical Hebrew, and not enough careful, systematic study of Biblical Hebrew itself. The modern followers of Gesenius make the same mistakes.

I borrowed and read part of a book by Waltke & O’Connor concerning many theories on Hebrew language. In that book they mentioned that by late second temple period, that spoken Hebrew had basically exchanged its Biblical grammar for what is largely the Indo-European grammar that is the basis of modern Israeli Hebrew. These are changes that started already during the Babylonian Exile. After the last of the native speakers died off shortly after the Babylonian exile, Hebrew continued to be spoken, but in the manner similar to that of medieval to modern speaking of Latin—a learned, second language, not a native tongue. As a second, studied language, it was influenced by the languages that Jews grew up speaking as their native tongues. Prominent among those native tongues were Persian, Greek and Latin, hence the change in grammar.

Mitchell Powell wrote:>>You will notice that Karl's dictionary doesn't even list meanings based on binyanim.

Is there a preface or something that outlines the reasons for that decision?

In the grammar section, I show that the binyanim in Biblical Hebrew are a type of conjugation that give consistent results across all verbs and verbal derivatives. Therefore, they are not like modern Israeli Hebrew (what little I know of it) where the binyanim are different lexical items instead of grammar.

Jason Hare wrote:…It assumes that the student understands grammar as it is taught in a standard textbook while denying the validity of that grammar.

The grammar is covered in the grammar section. The meanings of words are connected to knowing those forms and contexts and what they mean.

Jason Hare wrote:No attempt at a pronunciation is given,

I debated in myself about this question. Which pronunciations should we give? Modern pronunciation? A reconstruction based on old transliterations? Was Biblical Hebrew written as a syllabary, with each consonant followed by a vowel? For example, לבי from an ancient transliteration I saw was pronounced “labaya”. Two ancient transliterations of the name יפת, modern pronunciation “Yafeþ”. are “Yapete” and “Yupiter”, both indicating that Biblical Hebrew was a syllabary, each consonant followed by a vowel. Or after centuries of no native speakers leading to pronunciation changes, we still get רבקה pronounced as “Rebekkah” and כפרנחום as “Kapernahum”. Even if we use the modern schema, we still have to reconstruct when faced with examples where the Masoretic points indicate one meaning, while context and grammar forms indicate another meaning.

Jason Hare wrote:Words are defined as if by intuition and subject judgments.

Ever try writing a word’s meaning, when all you have are its grammatical forms and its contexts over enough examples to get an idea as to what it means, without any native speaker to correct you or give additional clues? This is without just copying another dictionary’s gloss?

Jason Hare wrote:In order for a student to use it, they would have to get the grammar (and pronunciation) from somewhere else.

The grammar is included so you don’t need to get another grammar from another source.

Jason Hare wrote:It assumes that students have used a better system to become acquainted with the language,

How is a system that is incorrect, therefore has to be unlearned in order to understand Tanakh, “better”?

But you do have a point that I probably should have a listing of general rules for pronunciations, not only of modern pronunciations, but also of other reconstructions, particularly of a syllabary which works well in poetry.

talmid56 wrote:

kwrandolph wrote:How do you have conversations in a language that hasn’t been spoken for 2500 years and whose pronunciations have long been forgotten. You certainly don’t have conversations in that language.

The same way you can in Latin and in Ancient Greek.…

Latin and ancient Greek have vowels written out. So we have at least some idea how to pronounce those languages, in spite of some disagreements. An example of some disagreement is πνευμα—I think the ευ is a true diphthong with a pronunciation of “ëū” while the pronunciation I was taught was “yū” but a German would pronounce as “oi”. Biblical Hebrew lacks written vowels. So which vowels do you suggest for Biblical Hebrew so you can have a conversation?

One final thought—one thing I learned about learning foreign languages, is that the way to master the learned language is to learn the quirks of how the languages are actually used, rather than trying to translate back to English. So for German “I am home gone”, Norwegian “Hit off the light” or Cantonese “open AC” (Yes, they said “AC”), so I tried to give the same feeling in this dictionary.

Karl W. Randolph.

So, then:

(1) Why am I able to successfully read the narratives of the Tanach without trouble?

(2) Why, when we were doing translation exercises, was I able to correct your expressions so often? Shouldn't you have a better grasp of the language than those of us whose knowledge of the language has been influenced by the modern language?

(3) Shouldn't you be able to demonstrate that your system produces better results? This would include your ability to pass it on to students, to show that it renders a better grasp of the language, to outshine the traditional method and produce students with a clearer understanding and use of the biblical language?

You're espousing a system that you think is better, but you yourself are ignorant of the modern language and not really in a position to tell us what is going on in the minds of people who come from a traditional training in the language. You haven't demonstrated anything that you're claiming. It's all just claims and amateurish attempts to undermine the authority of those who are, for lack of a better term, real authorities on the subject.

Again, if you read the same text with the same mistakes twenty times, you don't improve your knowledge of the text. You just reinforce your mistakes and make yourself feel that you have a better understanding of it - and that everyone else is just plain wrong. This doesn't lend me any confidence in your perspectives.

kwrandolph wrote:I borrowed and read part of a book by Waltke & O’Connor concerning many theories on Hebrew language. In that book they mentioned that by late second temple period, that spoken Hebrew had basically exchanged its Biblical grammar for what is largely the Indo-European grammar that is the basis of modern Israeli Hebrew. These are changes that started already during the Babylonian Exile. After the last of the native speakers died off shortly after the Babylonian exile, Hebrew continued to be spoken, but in the manner similar to that of medieval to modern speaking of Latin—a learned, second language, not a native tongue. As a second, studied language, it was influenced by the languages that Jews grew up speaking as their native tongues. Prominent among those native tongues were Persian, Greek and Latin, hence the change in grammar.

This means that the Hebrew that was spoken and written from the time of the Second Temple onward was different from what we find written in the Bible. In what ways?

(1) Word order.
(2) Lack of vav-consecutive forms.
(3) More strict conditional forms.
(4) Use of more periphrastic phrases (היה עושה for past-reference יעשה, for example).
(5) Vocabulary more influenced by the powers of the time.

It doesn't mean that we read a different grammar onto the biblical text by using modern pronunciation. It means that the grammar of rabbinic Hebrew underwent changes that led it away from the grammar of the Bible.

You've got things all mixed up. When we read the Bible with the Tiberian points, it doesn't mean that we're reading later or "medieval" grammar.

The only people I've ever met who thought that modern Hebrew was not beneficial for reading biblical Hebrew are people—let's not all be surprised together!—who do not themselves know modern Hebrew. I can literally say that I studied biblical Hebrew for two full academic years in Bible college, that I attended services in a synagogue and heard the text recited in prayer for extended periods, but... I did not feel that I knew Hebrew until I could literally sit down and read the Torah like a story book. I can now sit and read the text fluently and comfortably, and this comes as a result of having learned to speak Hebrew while keeping the text of the Bible in my sight at all times.

As someone who learned biblical Hebrew without modern Hebrew and then later learned modern Hebrew, I can add my voice the multitudes of those who will openly contradict what is being advocated here. Hebrew is Hebrew. Once you know the differences that the language underwent in later periods, and so long as you read the text of the Bible consistently and often, your knowledge of the biblical language will only be augmented and strengthened by learning Hebrew at any other period and getting a diachronic view of its development.

Grammar is how language is structured to convey meaning. It is not, generally speaking, dependent on any particular pronunciation system to do so. That is why people who have a good grasp of Biblical Hebrew can read it with comprehension, even if they read silently rather than aloud. Or if they use a different pronunciation than the Tiberian or Modern. Granted, in some cases, a pronunciation difference makes a difference in meaning.

On a practical level, most people find that they need some method of pronouncing the vocabulary and grammar forms when learning a new language. This is needed to retain the terms in their memory. This applies to ancient language learning as well. To take Egyptian as an example (which I have read about a little, but haven't studied), the full range of its pronunciation is not known. As I understand it, students of hieroglyphic Egyptian use a pronunciation system that is partly derived from Coptic, the latest form of the language which developed in the Greco-Roman period. That pronunciation is known only because Coptic is written in a script borrowed from Greek, with some additional signs. So we have a pronunciation system that is probably several centuries removed from the first periods the language was used. Yet, it is regularly used by students of the language. Not perfect, but better than nothing. At least it is a workable tool to help learn the language. However, to use a Coptic pronunciation for hieroglyphic Egyptian does not mean the student is reading hieroglyphs with a Greek grammar. This is so even though Coptic uses a script derived from Greek.