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Is Biblical Hebrew a language?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

Edward Ullendorff
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There is no need to explain what I mean by “Biblical Hebrew” (BH): I refer, of course, to the language of the major part of the Old Testament (OT) which is written in a Canaanite tongue clearly distinguished from the few chapters in Daniel and Ezra which are composed, or at any rate extant, in Aramaic. While we have no knowledge of the precise nature of the language spoken by the Hebrew immigrants into Canaan, it is likely that from a linguistic point of view the OT owes more to the vanquished Canaanites than to the conquering Hebrews. The latter are called 'iḇrīm already in the Patriarchal narratives (Gen. xiv, 13, xl, 15, etc.), but their language ('iḇrīṯ) is never as such mentioned in the OT. This may, of course, be owing to one of those purely fortuitous circumstances in the transmission of the ancient Hebrew vocabulary with which this paper is in part concerned. Whether yәhūḏīṯ ‘Jewish’ (2 Kings xviii, 26, Isa. xxxvi, 11, etc.), śәṗaṯ kәna'an ‘the language of Canaaan’ (Isa. xix, 18), and 'iḇrīṯ ‘Hebrew’ (first attested in the prologue to Ben Sira) are wholly identical is—as I have endeavoured to show elsewhere—not fully established.

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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , June 1971 , pp. 241 - 255
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Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1971

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References

2 cf. BJBL, XLIV, 2, 1962, 456 ffGoogle Scholar.

3 cf. Pei, Mario, Glossary of linguistic terminology, New York, 1966, 141Google Scholar.

4 e.g. iii, 16–26.

5 Driver in JBL, LXVHI, 1, 1949, 57 ffGoogle Scholar.

6 Albright in Peake's, Commentary on the Bible, new ed., Edinburgh, 1962, 62Google Scholar.

7 In reply to my inquiry Professor Albright very kindly tells me (letter of 15 September 1970): ‘I have tried to approximate the number of distinct meanings of words from a single root and, by distinguishing between conjugations which are quite diverse in meaning, to make a rough calculation of the total number of distinct words (aside from proper nouns) in the Hebrew Bible. One must cut out a considerable proportion of the accepted words in difficult poetic texts, since we don't know how the texts read originally.… All these uncertainties as to what to include make an estimate of 12,000–15,000 words… reasonably certain ’.

8 cf. Ullendorff, , ‘Thought categories in the Hebrew Bible’, in Loewe, R. (ed.), Studies… in memory of Leon Roth, London, 1966, 273–88Google Scholar.

9 cf. Ullendorff, in A companion to the Bible, second ed. (ed. Manson, and Rowley, ), Edinburgh, 1963, 11–18Google Scholar.

10 cf. David Kamhi's doctoral thesis on the adjective in Hebrew (University of London, 1969).

11 In Hebrew, of course. The New English Bible, OT, contains, I believe, about half a million words. The discrepancy is not surprising in view of the highly analytical character of English.

12 cf. Koehler, , Vom Hebräischen Lexikon, Leiden, Brill, 1950, 7Google Scholar.

Incidentally, E. T. Ryder's figure of ‘5,000 odd words’ (Peake, , op. cit., 68)Google Scholar is, I think, much too low, but these figures depend to some extent on one's conception of what constitutes a separate word in the Hebrew lexicon. Rabin offers (Biblical encyclopaedia (in Hebrew) under , col. 1069) the realistic estimate of 7,000–8,000 words.

13 Sanhedrin 21, b.

14 Hughes, , Dictionary of Islam, London, 1885, 489Google Scholar.

15 I am much indebted to Professor A. F. Falconer, Professor of English in the University of St. Andrews, for answering many questions and offering most helpful information.

16 Shakespeare's expert knowledge of the sea and ships has been described by ProfessorFalconer, A. F. in his Shakespeare and the sea (1964)Google Scholar and A glossary of Shakespeare's sea and naval terms, second ed. (1966). Glossaries of selected semantic fields would greatly extend our knowledge of the OT vocabulary and would enable us to gain a better assessment of its representativeness.

17 cf. Bergsträsser, , Hebr. Gramm., I, 11–14Google Scholar; Bauer-Leander, , Hist. Oramm. d. hebr. Spr., 25–7Google Scholar.

18 There is, in particular, Harris's, Z. S. essay in recovering the structure of Hebrew of about 600 b.c. (JAOS, LXI, 3, 1941, 143 ff.)Google Scholar. Cf. also Bergsträsser, , op. cit., § 30Google Scholar.

19 cf. Moscati, , L'epigrafia ebraica antica, Rome, 1951, 8 ffGoogle Scholar.

20 Archiv Orientální, XXIX, 2, 1961, 197–267Google Scholar.

21 The Lachish ostraca (in Hebrew), Jerusalem, 1940Google Scholar.

22 cf. some of the references in Jean-Hoftijzer, , Diet, des inscr. sém, de I'Ouest, Leiden, 1965, 332Google Scholar.

23 Ostracon 4:10; cf. Torczyner, , op. cit., 115 ffGoogle Scholar.

24 There is an impressive list of such late or Mishnaic phenomena in Barton's ICC on Ecclesiastes, 52–3.

25 cf. the important arguments adduced by Barr, J. in Comp. phil., 226Google Scholar.

26 Diqdtiq lәšon hammišnā, Tel-Aviv, , Devir, , 1936Google Scholar.

27 Volkssprache und Schriftsprachie im alten Arabien, Strassburg, 1906Google Scholar; see also Fück, , Arabiya, Berlin, 1950Google Scholar.

28 Segal, M. H., op. cit., 104Google Scholar.

29 Bibliographical details in Barr's, J.Semantics of Biblical language, OUP, 1962Google Scholar, and Biblical words far time, second ed., London, 1969, passimGoogle Scholar.

30 cf. Ullmann, S., The principles of semantics, second ed., Glasgow, , Jackson, : Oxford, Blackwell, 1957, 152–70Google Scholar.

31 ‘Sulla struttura dei colori in ebraico biblico’, in Stvdi linguistici in onore di Vittore Pisani, Brescia, 1969, 377–89Google Scholar. Cf. also Lyons, J., Introduction to theoretical linguistics, CUP, 1968, 57, 429CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Vet. Test., XIII, 3, 1963, 285–92Google Scholar; Oriens Antiquus, III, 1, 1964, 27–41Google Scholar.

33 Lyons, , op. cit., 55Google Scholar.

34 cf. Encyd. Brit., thirteenth ed., XXV, 733.

35 cf. Encyd. Brit., thirteenth ed., VI, 750; see also Benzinger, , Hebräische Archäologie, third ed., 1927, 93–4Google Scholar.

36 Masada, London, 1966, 149Google Scholar.

37 cf. Gesenius-Kautzach-Cowley, , Hebrew grammar, second ed., 507 ff.Google Scholar; Bauer-Leander, , Hist. Gramm., § 47Google Scholar.

38 Jewish encyclopedia, VI, 226–9.

39 Article in Biblical encyclopaedia.

40 The discrepancy in these figures is probably due to the difficulty of identifying some hapax legomena beyond reasonable doubt. It may be easy to count the number of those unique in root or form, but the establishment of those considered hapax legomena in meaning or owing to being homonyms is more problematic, as it depends on interpretation and exegesis.

41 cf. Tur-Sinai, , Hallašon wәhassefer (vol. hallašon), 368Google Scholar.

42 One can imagine, apropos of ‘sneezing’, the number of treatises, written by those all too ready to draw extra-linguistic conclusions from linguistic data, about the climate of Palestine and the absence of the common cold in Biblical times—if it had not been for the fact that Job has the hapax legomenon !

43 In Haran, M. and Luria, B.-Z. (ed.), Sefer Tur-Sinai, Jerusalem, 1960, 279–88Google Scholar.

44 In his remarkable and very characteristic autobiographical sketches Fantasmi ritrovati Venice, 1966, 17Google Scholar.