In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language

2. Rules of the Game

Chapter 2 Rules of the Game [We must play the game.] — Plato, c. 375 B.C.E. We have a few preliminary matters to attend to before embarking on our journey through history and becoming acquainted with the first stages of Hebrew. There are at least three ways one might look at history, and at least two ways one might look at language. Because we are concerned here in no small part with looking at the history of a language, we will do well to sort out these matters, along with some matters of notation. But we are anxious to start our actual investigation of Hebrew, so we’ll take only a brief look at some of the relevant issues here, with more complete discussions appearing in Appendix A. Three Theories of the World There are, in principle, at least three ways one might try to understand the world. We can call these: 1. The Dumb-Luck Theory; 2. The God Theory; and 3. The Science Theory. Our choice of theories will have important consequences for how we interpret data about the past, so it is important to understand the three before we get started. The Dumb-Luck Theory explains everything as being coincidence. With this approach, the world is basically orderless, and any order that 7 8 Rules of the Game may seem to present itself is the result of coincidence. For example, if you shuffle a deck of regular playing cards for a while and it turns out that after being shuffled the cards are arranged from ace to king in order of suit, the Dumb-Luck Theory explains that every so often, by pure dumb luck, that particular order will present itself, and no further explanation is necessary. Similarly, the sun may or may not rise tomorrow, but if it does, it is just happenstance. The fact that the sun rose this morning is also happenstance. By contrast, the God Theory explains everything as being determined by God. If you shuffle a deck of playing cards and the cards nonetheless end up in order, the God Theory explains that this is God’s will. The sun will rise tomorrow because God makes the sun rise; or, if the sun does not rise, it is because God does not want it to rise. The sun rose this morning because God made it. Finally, the Science Theory claims that there is an underlying order to the universe that we humans can understand. If you shuffle a deck of playing cards and they end up arranged by suit in ascending order, there must be some ordering force at work. (For example, maybe you cheated.) Likewise, we fully expect the sun to rise, and we believe we know why. We also know why the sun rose this morning. Many accounts of Hebrew and antiquity suffer from a confusion among these three theories, so we will be very clear that, for the purposes of this book, we are adopting the Science Theory and ignoring the Dumb-Luck Theory and the God Theory. More details about the three theories, and the ramifications of our decision, appear in Appendix A. Two Theories of Language In large part, this book is about language. Accordingly, just as we chose the Science Theory over two others, we must decide what view of language we will adopt. Having already chosen to pursue the Science Theory in this book, we will, naturally, choose a scientific theory of language. There are two common (and, often, competing) theories of language: 1. prescriptive linguistics 2. descriptive linguistics1 Prescriptive linguistics is the approach to language that most people 1. It is unfortunate that the names for these two competing theories sound so similar. This is not the only pair of opposites that sound alike. Others include the English (Greek-derived) prefixes hypo- (“too little”) and hyper- (“too much”), and the French au dessous (“under”) and au-dessus (“over”). Rules of the Game 9 meet in high-school English class. It teaches that there is a right and wrong way to speak, and that most of us, left to our own devices, speak incorrectly, which is why we have to be taught to speak correctly. For example, most of us tend to end sentences with prepositions (“Who are you talking to?”). But we are taught that ending a sentence with a preposition is wrong. The preposition — as the name...