Hone Your Craft as a Biblical Scholar
Steve Runge has a good introduction to the question of contrast and conjunctions’ relationship to it. Overall, conjunctions “do not create contrast that wasn’t already there, they simply amplify it. If there is no contrast present, using a contrastive conjunction is infelicitous as the linguists say. It comes across as wrong.” For more, see Steve’s original post.
Fred Putnam’s New Grammar of Biblical Hebrew is now out, and the grammar should be available from the Westminster Bookstore sometime next month. According to the publisher,
This is a Hebrew grammar with a difference, being the first truly discourse-based grammar. Its goal is for students to understand Biblical Hebrew as a language, seeing its forms and conjugations as a coherent linguistic system, appreciating why and how the text means what it says—rather than learning Hebrew as a set of random rules and apparently arbitrary meanings.
Thirty-one lessons equip learners for reading the biblical text in Hebrew. They include sections on biblical narrative, poetry, and the Masora—as well as of the text of the Hebrew Bible, lexica, and concordances. The examples and exercises are all taken directly from the biblical text, so that students can check their work against any relatively literal version of the Bible. The vocabulary lists include all of the words that occur fifty times or more in the Hebrew Bible.
Special also to this Grammar are the ‘enrichments’: brief sections at the end of each chapter encouraging students to apply their grammatical knowledge to specific questions, issues, or passages in the biblical text. Appendices include a Vocabulary of all Hebrew words and proper names that occur fifty times or more, and a Glossary and index of technical terms—as well as complete nominal, pronominal, and verbal paradigms, and an annotated bibliography.
The learner-friendly design of this Grammar has been endorsed by faculty and by students who have used pre-publication versions to teach themselves Biblical Hebrew, both individually, in classes, and in informal groups.
Even just from the (all too) limited degree to which I know Fred, he is an excellent fellow and a highly energetic and enthusiastic teacher. So, his Grammar and its pedagogy are sure to merit careful consideration, and I am certainly looking forward to an opportunity to work through them at some point.
This week in the biblioblogosphere:
The equivalent of 15 print volumes of over 1,800 Oxyrhynchus Papyri fragments are now available to order from Logos via their pre-publication discount program. Details about the module and a list of the papyri it will include are available here.
Despite the imperial connection that might have been expected to promote the Latin tongue, “[e]ven after Rome became the world power in the first century BCE, Greek continued to penetrate distant lands. (This was due largely to Rome’s policy of assimilation of cultures already in place, rather than destruction and replacement.) Consequently, [when Pompey conquered Palestine in 63 BC (Ferguson 411) and] even when Rome was in absolute control [under Augustus in 31 BC-AD 14 (cf. Ferguson 26–30)], Latin was not the lingua franca. Greek continued to be a universal language until at least the end of the first century” (Wallace 18). Moreover, when one considers the strong Jewish presence in Palestine, it becomes clear that Hebrew and Aramaic would constitute important languages in the Palestinian milieu (cf. Poirier 55).
“Some scholars argue that (Mishnaic) Hebrew was actually the primary language of first-century Palestine [cf. Poirier 56]. Yet, Hebrew was apparently not widely used by the masses,” as very few Hebrew inscriptions remain from this period (Wallace 24; contra Poirier 59). Although Qumran, Masada, Murabba’at, and the Bar Kokhba caves demonstrate that Hebrew was widely used around first-century Palestine, the extent to which the general (Jewish) populace would have been intimate with the language is somewhat in doubt (Wilcox 979). Moreover, although the Bar Kokhba archives contain a substantial amount of Hebrew material, that Hebrew is often heavily influenced by Aramaic, and in any case, the archives as a whole contain more material in Aramaic than in Hebrew (Poirier 61, 63). Indeed, after the exiles returned, their Hebrew competency seems to have been greatly diminished (Ferguson 499; contra Poirier 56–57), hence the rise of the Aramaic targum tradition (Neh 8:5-8; McNamara 210), which provides still more persuasive evidence for Aramaic having greater currency than Hebrew in first-century Palestine. Similarly, Hellenistic and Diaspora Jews (cf. Jobes and Silva 20) adopted the LXX/OG tradition, pragmatically preferring this tradition to the proto-Massoretic text.
The targum tradition’s growth over subsequent centuries indicates a continued demand for such material, which was eventually set down in writing (Ferguson 500). Consequently, one may conclude that, while some first-century Jews (e.g., Jesus in Luke 4:16–19) certainly had a command of biblical Hebrew, large segments of the population were probably only nominally familiar with the language (Ferguson 580; cf. Wallace 24). Additionally, we should note that first-century Hebrew was in a transitional period between its biblical and Mishnaic forms, but “it is just those features in which Mishnaic Hebrew differs from Biblical Hebrew that it tends to be akin to Aramaic” (Wilcox 993). Thus, Hebrew and Aramaic may both have had currency in first-century Palestine, although the more popular Aramaic was shaping the less popular Hebrew.
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The linguistic situation in Palestine during the first century AD was, to say the least, quite complex because it involved interaction among four different languages—namely, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The presence of other languages is also apparent, and although few individuals were probably fluent in three or more of these languages, many were probably bilingual (Poirier 56). In seeking to understand this multi-faceted situation, our strategy will be to handle the less common languages first and proceed to the more common ones. Although language distribution “varied almost personally” (Poirier 56, quoting Barr 112), of primary concern will be the question: Which language(s) held vernacular or nearly vernacular status?
Languages like Coptic (from Egypt) and Persian (from eastern Mesopotamia) appear in first century Palestine, at the very least in loan-word form (Blass, Debrunner, and Funk §6; cf. Wilcox 981). Yet, while these languages may have been present, one must regard their influence in Palestine during this period as minimal. Slightly more influential and prominent was the Latin language (Blass, Debrunner, and Funk §5; cf. Poirier 55). For instance, some Greek suffixes during this period appear to have been influenced by Latin (Blass, Debrunner, and Funk §5.2). Moreover, given the Roman governance, which was in place in Palestine, one would expect, as is in fact the case, that various Latin governmental, administrative, military, legal, and commercial terms and expressions would be adopted by speakers whose primary language was not Latin (Blass, Debrunner, and Funk §5.1, 5.3). Additionally, beyond these individual terms, some phrases of Latin origin were also current in Palestinian Greek (Blass, Debrunner, and Funk §5.3).
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