You may have convinced Stoney, but your original proposition is still way off base. The sole *surviving* witnesses are religious documents, but your proposition assumes that those form a legitimate sampling of the entirety of the historical works. You bring out as support to your proposition the case of a people who had come from a lengthy stay in a land where both the trade and legal languages were something other than Hebrew. One would not expect that the average person would then maintain Hebrew as their lingua franca, especially since there is significant evidence that many (perhaps most) chose to assimilate into the new culture. How else should we interpret the fact that there was not an en masse exodus to the homeland when such was allowed? In this situation, we would expect that the ones who would preserve the "home language" would be those who would have motivation other than trade or day-to-day activities. Those who are more concerned with religious matters would have such additional motivation. So it is not at all surviving when, upon a revival of the religious matters, the average person, who might have never even learned the Hebrew language, would need the ones who preserved the language skill to explain the text to him.
We actually have Biblical claims that there were other documents written during the kingdom period, the period before the captivity which I believe caused the situation resulting in the priests needing to explain the text to the average people. The books of the Kings make several references to chronicles which have not survived to the modern period. Are you proposing that those were written in a language other than Hebrew, or that those were religious in character? I would expect that they were indeed written in Hebrew, and were in general secular. If these were Hebrew secular documents which did not survive the ages, why should we not expect that there would be other, more mundane documents which were not preserved? Your Exodus reference (is it really too difficult for people writing Hebrew on this list to use right-to-left word order?) actually shoots your proposition in the foot. If the nation is to be one of priests, would that not imply that the nation as a whole would have the skills of the priesthood? If, as is your proposition, those skills would include literacy, it would follow that the nation in general would be literate. This response to Stoney is an example of your habitual treatment of the Tanakh as a unified body. This may be acceptable in theological discussions, but goes beyond what we have generally agreed to do on this list. We may refer to other texts to determine the meaning of a word or phrase or form, but to take the *teaching* of a passage and use it to interpret the meaning of another passage is getting away from the study of the language itself. Every thread that you have tried to originate since you joined this list seems to have been aimed at making general statements about the Hebrew Bible. Perhaps your posts would be more in line with the historical purpose of this list if you shifted your focus to the *elements* of the language and not the language in general or culture/history of the Hebrew Bible. Well, I'm going to crawl back into lurker mode. Too many other distractions to lengthy discussions onlist! Paul Zellmer -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of fred burlingame Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010 1:16 PM To: Stoney Breyer Cc: B-Hebrew Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] the intended consumer of biblical hebrew language An interesting theory, the secular nature of the biblical hebrew language; but one bereft of factual support. Indeed, the sole witness to the language includes a highly religious document, aka the masoretic text; and its dead sea scrolls fragmentary predecessor. The internal testimony of that document further confirms the intended religious nature of the language itself, given the announced purpose of the nation writing the language. ואתם תהיו לי ממלכת כהנים וגוי קדוש שמות 19:6 As for the consumer of the written language, the priestly monopolistic and exploitative behavior that you propose, could have occurred only in the general absence of written words or scrolls. Such generally accepted rarity of written materials itself implies the illiteracy of the 14th century hebrew, and the corresponding exclusivity of the written document for the ruling class. _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
