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Chapter 8 Dialects in the Bible So far we have been talking about “Biblical Hebrew” as though all of the Hebrew in the Bible were the same. But it is not. It turns out that more than one stage of Hebrew is evidenced in the Masoretic version of the Bible as we know it today. Of course, it should come as no surprise that a compilation of material that was composed over the course of several hundred years and then copied, edited, and (inadvertently and by design) changed for several hundred more should contain more than one dialect of the language in which it was written. Scholars have worked to identify the various authors of the Bible based on content and style. They notice that different sections of the Bible tend to place more or less emphasis on the priests, for example, or on the prophetic traditions. They notice wording variations and different ways of referring to God. They find repeated passages within a story, and try to tease apart different original versions of the story that may have been combined at one point. But we will not review those efforts here. Rather, we will focus on the more limited domain of major linguistic trends, the most important of which is the set of changes that took place after the exile in 586 B.C.E. to create what is known as “Late Biblical Hebrew,” a term that is somewhat confusing, because “Biblical Hebrew” generally refers to all of the Hebrew used to write the Bible, and therefore includes “Late Biblical Hebrew.” There ought to be a corresponding term, “Early Biblical Hebrew,” but it is seldom used. So when we talk about all of the Hebrew of the Bible, we call it simply “Biblical Hebrew,” but when we talk about “Late Biblical Hebrew,” we contrast it with “Biblical Hebrew,” by which we mean earlier Biblical Hebrew. After looking at Late Biblical Hebrew, we will look at the ramifications of seeing more than one dialect reflected in the Masoretic text of the Bible. 149 150 Dialects in the Bible Late Biblical Hebrew Overview We saw three aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) in the last chapter. The Hebrew spelling in the DSS is generally fuller — that is, written with more vowel letters — than the spelling in the Bible; the wording of the DSS differs from the Masoretic understanding of some passages; and sometimes the content of the DSS differs from parallel passages in the Masoretic tradition. Occasionally these three patterns of divergence are evident not only when comparing the DSS and the canonical (Masoretic) Biblical text, but within the canonized Bible as well. For example, we can compare Chronicles, which seems to have been written relatively late, with Samuel or Kings. The Hebrew spelling of David’s name in Chronicles matches the fuller spelling we saw in the Hebrew of the DSS, in that it has a yud to represent the vowel /i/: daled, vav, yud, daled ( ). By contrast, it is usually spelled without the yud in Samuel and Kings. Sometimes we are lucky enough to find entire passages from Samuel or Kings repeated verbatim or nearly verbatim in Chronicles. When the passages differ in minor ways, we can use the differences to help discern trends in the development of Hebrew. For example, the text in 1 Kings 8:12– 16 is repeated in 2 Chronicles 6:1–5, but in Chronicles, David’s name has the yud, a fact that belongs in a larger context. Vowel Letters Table 8.1 shows a passage that appears twice in the Masoretic version of the Bible, once in 1 Kings and once in 2 Chronicles, and Table 8.2 compares some of the Hebrew words as they are spelled in the two passages. Clearly the texts have the same source, so it seems fair to ask why they differ in minor wording details, spelling, and grammar. One possibility, of course, is that the differences are a matter of chance. For example, the JPS1 English translation of these two passages differs slightly. The translation of Kings reads, “. . . with the whole congregation of Israel standing . . . ” while the translation of the same Hebrew in Chronicles reads, “. . . as the whole congregation of Israel stood . . . ” (We have put the words that differ in boldface.) In spite of the fact that a footnote tells the 1. “Jewish Publication Society.” The widely-used JPS translation is listed in the Bibliography under its editor, David Stein. [3.143.17...

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