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WHAT A DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES: CAN BIBLICAL TEXTS BE DATED LINGUISTICALLY?* Ziony Zevit University of Judaism Language played almost no role in dating biblical texts in historicalcritical scholarship prior to the middle of the twentieth century. Texts such as Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, Amos, Isaiah of Jerusalem, Second Isaiah, and the like were dated according to explicit references in their contents. Texts lacking such references were dated according to their supposedly implicit references to externally datable events. Others were dated by their theology or attitude towards the cult as determined by a chronological scale linked to some form of the documentary hypothesis as expounded by Julius Wellhausen or Abraham Kuenen, both of whom accepted a late, post-exilic date for the Priestly source as propounded by Karl Heinrich Graf. This scale was based on Enlightenment notions about the evolution of religion in general and Israelite religion in particular as a stage between primitive religion and Christianity. When first propounded, these evolutionary ideas were well-founded and tightly linked to historical theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But that clear theory with its chronological implications was confounded after the implications of discoveries in the ancient Near East were acknowledged by biblicists. The old critical consensus about the chronological dating of developmental stages in Israelite religion and of biblical books became vulnerable and challengeable. Some objective method was required to date the literature. The study of language history evolved in Europe during the nineteenth century and was able to mark impressive advances by the beginning of the twentieth century. The study of Hebrew lagged behind because there was no concentrated body of scholars interested in it. A “tipping point” was reached in 1925 with the establishment of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Since then, the discipline has attracted a few hundred researchers, developed a large body of competent, reliable literature, and has revealed unsurprisingly that Hebrew is a language with a history, just like other languages. One significant discovery of significance to our panel today was that * These introductory remarks were delivered at the NAPH session that met during the 2005 SBL meeting. The collection of articles from the first symposium may be found in HS 46 (2005), pp. 321–376. Hebrew Studies 47 (2006) 84 Zevit: What a Difference Hebrew remained a spoken language and mother tongue until the second century C.E. In 2005, historians of Hebrew were aware that in addition to the Hebrew of the Iron Age, Neo-Babylonian, Persian, and early Hellenistic periods attested in the Bible and inscriptions, there was Hebrew of the Greco-Roman periods, described variously as Mishnaic or Tannaitic Hebrew, within which dialects have been discerned that are classified both diachronically and regionally . The dialect of the sectarian Qumran scrolls belongs to this broad chronological horizon as does that of the Samaritan Pentateuch. From later periods we have Medieval Hebrew in various dialects characterized both by date (early, middle, late) and geography (Palestine, Babylon, Syria and Egypt, and Europe), Enlightenment (Haskalah) Hebrew, and Modern Israeli Hebrew. Viewed diachronically, each definable later stage emerged from an earlier stage, preserving much and changing some of the inherited features as well as innovating on the basis of inner-Hebrew catalysts and external linguistic factors. But what of pre-Mishnaic-Tannaitic-Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew? Proto-Hebrew evolved from one or more of the West-Semitic Canaanite dialects of the late fourteenth century B.C.E. described by Anson Rainey in his four-volume, 1996 study of the dialects underlying the Amarna tablets, and may be of Transjordanian origin.1 Rainey’s work, provides us only with a terminus ante quem. Randy Garr’s 1985 work helps locate and define individuated Hebrew dialects within the Syria-Palestine dialect continuum of the tenth-sixth centuries.2 Garr’s discussion of phonology may be expanded somewhat in the light of Robert Woodhouse’s 2003 study of sibilants and of Richard C. Steiner’s innovative 2005 study dating how phonemes represented by the graphemes fiayin and h . et were rendered in various Hebrew dialects of the Greco-Roman period.3 Dating biblical books is not quite the same as dating the Hebrew of the biblical period in...

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