Ron Hendel : How Old Is The Bible?

well told you my name is I teach Jewish history in the history department likes to mess with the Bible is written so I this is kind of a series of lectures that we have so I just wanna bring attention to the lecture that we have next week at this time by Steve Weitzman who is another he started life as a as a Bible scholar and has grown far and wide from that but he is he's just come out with a new book on the origin of the Jews and he's talk next week is entitled how does the story of the Jews begin recent debates on origins and ancestry so it has Ron is dealing with the text and stupidly talking about the people of the text or the wrote the text so that's next week 515 the same time run for those who don't know has been here for some time and 1999 and is a smaller of the Hebrew Bible the perimeter schools and he studies the Bible looks at the Bible through a number of different prisms through thee through the history of religions as one approach that he takes the textual criticism linguistics and virology comparative mythology literature and the prison of cultural memory he is also the editor who's a very long list of publications who is the editor-in-chief of the Hebrew Bible a critical Edition which he assures me it's better than the original a new critical edition of the Hebrew text itself the first volume on problems came out 2015 remembering Abraham culture history and memory of the Hebrew Bible reading Genesis 10 methods hookah Genesis and biography and most recently is this book that he is he that he has co-authored with young Houston called how old is the Hebrew Bible with linguistic textual and historical study Ron is not just a dear friend and a colleague by the co-teacher of mine even though thousands of years apart even though the history history that we study and the work that we do we managed to cobble together a course called ancient Israel in the modern Western imagination and it's been one of the highlights of my time here at Berkeley which is now coming up to 17 years it's been it's a pleasure to teach with him and a pleasure to be friends with him and to learn from him as well as we're going to do right now thanks John it's a delight - is it a delight it's a harrowing trial to be here before you today because I have the challenge of describing this book that I wrote with a friend of mine at Oxford which is a very specialist book okay so these three people in my graduate seminar they can mmm sort of understand what I'm trying to do the rest of you won't have a clue so so my task today is to talk you through what I'm trying to do and give you some examples give you a taste of things and do it so that you're not all comatose or catatonic by the end oh yeah good so so let me give you a short answer how old is the Bible and specifically talking about how old is the Hebrew Bible the answer is pretty old any questions thank you I told you I could do it in less than yea it's pretty old so now this is one of the things that scholars do okay we get involved in these long discussions these long arguments this particular argument has been going on for mmm since about 1600 and we're not quite finished with this argument yet but you could actually argue it started earlier Abraham ibn Ezra who was one of the great medieval Jewish commentators noticed that there are parts of the Pentateuch that Moses couldn't have written for example his burial I mean he could have written it and there's one wonderful little story in the Talmud where when rabbi argh is well know Moses wrote it but a tear came down his eyes as he wrote it not sweet because he's writing about his own funeral and it's done but it benezia noticed that you know there's there's these things even in the the burial of Moses it says no one knows where that was so you know it's as if it has been forgotten and then it says there hasn't been since that day there hasn't been another man like Moses with whom God spoke face to face now ebin Ezra was a very smart reader of texts and he realized you know if it says ever since then there hasn't been someone like Moses this was written a good time after Moses but even Ezra said very wisely this is a secret of the text he didn't go into these details he just says he called he called the end of Deuteronomy Deuteronomy 34 which has 12 verses he called that the secret of the twelve okay and he said let he who understands keep silent so he liked to give hints for the wise about these things that he was perceiving in the text but he was himself wise enough not to say it out loud so let those who understand keep silent now the problem with modern scholars is that we can't keep silent okay and it was actually Baruch Spinoza my fav my favorite Jewish heretic who said it out loud in very strong terms for the first time and he said ibanez appointed at this and what he meant was x y&z so all these places all these clues that the Pentateuch or at least large chunks of it must have been written a long time after the time of Moses and Spinoza said concluded it is as clear as the light of day that Moses did not write the pen and he had other reasons too so that's a big difference saying keep quiet versus it's clear as the light of day okay so so the but this kind of course this is why he was expelled from the Jewish community and declared a heretic and so forth it was actually before he wrote that but he was you might have been saying things like that earlier so this is what biblical scholars have been doing since you know 1670 or so when Spinoza first published this trying to figure out how old is the Hebrew Bible who wrote it trying to set its and again this is this is part of the program that Spinoza laid out what is the history of the book the history of the composition of the book how has passed down over time how different people put together the different books or even the different parts of books how the yeah the the vicissitudes that the text experienced through time how different people have understood it and so forth and the goal is for all this historicizing is to understand the text on its own terms to the great to the you know most granular degree that we can so it's all got a hermeneutical thrust that we want to read the text and understand it so in a sense this is a preliminary a set of preliminary questions but you know it still takes 400 years to work through the preliminary questions yeah let me show you a picture here how old is the Bible this is a really lousy picture of the oldest one of the oldest Scrolls that we have of the Bible this is from the Dead Sea Scrolls this is the one cue Isaiah which means it's from cave one of Qumran which is these caves by the Dead Sea and this is a scroll of Isaiah and it's the first scroll of Isaiah that was found this is called the great Isaiah scroll you can't really tell here oh that's better yeah you can see it's really great it's about half of book and this was one of the very first Scrolls found from the Dead Sea Scrolls and it's actually so readable that when it was first found the the Bedouins took it to antiquities dealer in Bethlehem who was also a shoemaker antiquities dealer on the side until he got the Dead Sea's girls then I think he stopped making shoes but this cobbler took it to various scholars and it's so readable they said oh this must have been from like a 19th century synagogue because it's in really really good shape but in fact this is from about a hundred and fifty BC or BCE and it just happened to be beautifully preserved in these caves at Qumran so these are the oldest actual texts that we have of the Hebrew Bible okay stuff from the Dead Sea Scrolls and they range from the oldest of these is from maybe 250 BCE or so and so those are the oldest actual texts of the Hebrew Bible that we have so you can say that it's not more recent than let's say 250 BC because we have actual copies that are that old if the books went through a complicated process of composition and compilation and so forth then you have to push it back at least a little bit farther in the last 50 years or so some scholars have argued that you really don't have to push them more than say 50 or 100 years before the Dead Sea Scrolls and so there's a lot of scholars now let me just tell you no I just say in passing they're wrong okay but there's a lot of scholars who argue that most of the Hebrew Bible or all of the Hebrew Bible was written relatively late in what we would call the Hellenistic period or in the Persian period this is this is after the Babylonian exile after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple and the monarchy and stuff like that before that the idea was most of the Hebrew Bible the parts of it are pretty exhilarating the time of these Kings and then some of the late books are post-exilic written em good question good question the process of writing and compiling but really we're talking about writing because you it's hard to tell when you can compile really old texts the picture that we have at least for the Pentateuch for the Torah the picture that we have in the Bible is that Ezra brings it back from Babylonian exile and brings this Torah of Moses to Jerusalem and reads it all day long it's a really sweet scene because every all the old people cry because they remember the glory of the pre-exilic period and he just reads it all day long so this is the picture that we have in the Bible of the kind of publication of the Torah that is to say making it public so at least the biblical idea is that by you know the fifth century or so at least the Torah was finished but yeah so the idea that's a really good question it said all the people cried but you're right that's like 450 there wouldn't have been any one there from before or 586 yeah well you'd cry anyway you know it's it's evoking the past grandeur of the people and now the people is in ruins and it's poor and just Jerusalem is a destruction yeah so it was that they remembered but not personally the grandeur of the people yeah that's a good point although Methuselah lived 969 years you know give or take but even if you know so the idea here and I'm not saying this is how it happened but this is the biblical picture that Ezra came from Babylonian exile there was a big Jew community in Babylon as there was for many thousands of years that's they were the people that later wrote the Babylonian Talmud that people there would have done the compiling they would have had documents that were brought to from to the Exile from Jerusalem and that people there would have done the compiling and then Azra brought it back in this put together for him so the question is how old are these texts even if they don't become public until this period of the this is the Persian period already for Ezra but how old is the stuff that's in those books okay and as I've said there's a lot of scholars who in recent generations have argued that all of it was from roughly the time of Ezra that it was mostly written at the time when it was first published yeah I'm being I'm being fuzzy here I think on purpose okay this is a good counter argument against most of the people in my field yeah so we're talking primarily about the Pentateuch the Torah and the former prophets okay so Joshua judges Samuel and kings and you know a bunch of the prophetic books so if everything is from the time of Ezra more-or-less or from the Persian period and then later the Hellenistic period then the stuff that looks and sounds old in fact isn't the stuff that looks and sounds pre-exilic you know stories about Solomon and David and you know neo-assyrian empire and stuff would have been later imaginings by this later period yeah so but in a sense you're you're replicating the discussion within the field over the last 40 years okay and let me let me just say again the people who argue that it's all eight are wrong so these points that you're making that biblical scholars have made you know how would they know that Shishak just you know went to war against jerusalem in the 10th century how would they know that in the fifth century and that's a good question and in fact it's that's an argument that they wouldn't have known things like that but most of my colleagues in Europe dated all most of the the Bible into the exilic and post-exilic periods a bunch of them in America a bunch of them in England so I would say it's at least half in half that half of the field has bought this story that all that it's all laid now this is why my friend and I wrote this book to refute that which is another fun thing that scholars get to do we love we love to argue so here's the oldest texts now how do you really date this stuff then how do you tell what's old and what's not and there's all sorts of things you can say I mean it's something like you know how would you know about some Egyptian pharaoh invading the place well you could argue that there were steely or archives that you could consult I mean most of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian history actually comes from a Hellenistic era history of Egypt written by a a Egyptian priest who's a who writes in Greek so there was you know ancient history that was known in the Hellenistic period so how do we really adjudicating sorts of issues so one of the things and I think really the only solid way to do it is to understand the history of the language to understand the history of Biblical Hebrew so this means you're doing linguistics historical linguistics and what the general picture that people have developed at least in rough form is that there are four different phases of ancient Biblical Hebrew the oldest part and and again this these are very controversial issues in my field I'm just telling you the correct version okay but a lot of people would say now this is all baloney but again they would be wrong okay so there's old poems that have what many of us would argue is the phase of the language that we call archaic biblical hebrew this is the oldest phase of the Hebrew language that's the oldest preserved phase of the Hebrew language this is in poems like the song of the sea' in Exodus 15 or Moses and the Israelites are praising God for for destroying the Egyptians and leading people through the Red Sea the song of Deborah in judges 5 which is another kind of war hymn about war against the Canaanites the blessings of Jacob at the end of Genesis where Jacob is blessing and describing all of the different tribes of Israel to who are his children or descendants of his children and the blessings of Moses at the end of Deuteronomy where Moses is doing something very similar he's giving blessings and occasionally curses on the different tribes of Israel so this is the old arguably the oldest base and this here is a picture of the last part of the song of the sea' one of these old poems in act from the oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible that we have which is called the st. Petersburg codex or the Leningrad codex I like to refer to it as st. Petersburg because the place isn't Leningrad anymore and I don't think Lenin was that admirable of an a good guy but but even the scribes who are transmitting these they sense that this was poetry and so they put it in a poetic an interesting poetic form which then goes into the prose that follows the poem so this is just an example from our oldest complete biblical text this dates to about a thousand seee and it's there's all sorts of beautiful little commentary Phil illogical notes and kind of concordance things up here and then they make them into funny little shapes which is very cute this is what medieval scribes did to amuse themselves okay most of the prose that we have in the Pentateuch and the former prophets is written in a register and dialect of Hebrew that we call classical Biblical Hebrew okay the going to the fourth when late Biblical Hebrew is a is a more developed kind of Hebrew that we have in books that are clearly later books like the book of Esther the Book of Chronicles that mention things during the Persian period okay so when there's references to Persian things the style of the language that correlates with that is this late biblical hebrew and then recently people have argued that some books have a kind of interesting mix between classical and light and so have come up with the label transitional biblical hebrew these are books like jeremiah and ezekiel and lamentations that come on either side shortly either side of the babylonian exile so basically what we do in this book is try to collect all of the relevant evidence and to advance our understanding of the details of archaic biblical hebrew classical hebrew transitional hebrew and late Hebrew extending it beyond and this is a lot of this is my colleague at Oxford who has really extended our understanding of these phases beyond merely words and lexicon into grammar okay and so this is really important I think because to some degree and people argue that well why why can't why couldn't in the Persian period even if people are writing late Biblical Hebrew why couldn't they write classical Biblical Hebrew - in which case it all could have been written around the time of Ezra part of our argument is if it's just a matter of words individual nouns you know you pretty much could do that I mean I could say V and vow right and I could sort of fake Shakespearean English by throwing in a bunch of these and those and you know fartole and you know a few words that you know from Shakespeare how goest thou this lofty day gentle person wherefore wherefore art thou going crossing the street to get to Starbucks Oh wherefore uh so you trick me okay so now here's some of the things you have to really know the meaning of these words to get them right wherefore means why okay who knew but you can do it to some degree with with vocabulary it's much much harder to do it with syntax because syntax and grammar you know what kind of secret what kind of sequences of clauses and things like that this is a much more kind of unconscious aspect of linguistic competence okay and I just wouldn't have a clue about how to reproduce Shakespearean syntax it's just not something that's really consciously available in your mind you know unless you're a linguist so part of our argument is that the difference is between these different phases are not just you know thou versus you you know nouns that replace each other there's also very subtle but systematic syntactic grammatical patterns that change from one to the other and these things you you can't really fake you can't really imitate correctly I mean in theory one could but ordinary people can't okay and even extraordinary people I think wouldn't be able to so our argument is that this four-part division of the phases of Hebrew really is a chronological sequence so that for example if most of the book of Samuel is written in classical Biblical Hebrew this is an earlier phase then you know the corresponding parts of the Book of Chronicles which is written in late Biblical Hebrew which is what people sort of thought all the time but I think that this is what people have argued isn't the case but now we're saying yeah it really is the case you know what else would I want to say so these are not different styles that are contemporary that are contemporaneous literary styles these are really sequential linguistic periods oh yeah the other thing I want to say is how do you understand the sequence which one come or how can you know let me say this again even if you can determine that these are relatively sequential how can you put absolute dates to things that's a big question the answer is the only way you can do that is to have linguistic things that are dateable and we do have those to a certain degree in the inscriptions that we have in ancient Hebrew okay we have pre-exilic inscriptions and they are written in classical Biblical Hebrew and not and again not just the words but as we demonstrate the syntax okay so this gives us an empirical peg to say the classical biblical hebrew was the type of hebrew that was used in the pre monarchic period from you know let's say 900 to 600 BC now this is nice so this is where our inscriptions come from this means that we can date these books like Samuel and most of the Pentateuch and most of Kings and so forth to the period of classical Biblical Hebrew to the 9th to the 6th century BC so this gives us a leg up on previous discussions that were more impressionistic or that used arguments of lexicon which isn't as strong as syntax and it absolutely destroys the people who say that this stuff was written in the Persian period now they don't know it yet but it destroys them ok let me give you an example and first I want to give you an example of lexicon because it's the most straightforward this example is the word is is the word for letter like when you write a letter and send it to somebody it used to be now I know I'm looking around you can understand this it used to be people sent physical letters on paper to each other do you know that my my children don't know that they say what's that papered this is some archaic Iron Age contrivance but in the Iron Age they did send letters and it would be on papyrus usually and sometimes it would be on a potsherd and this is an example of a papyrus one a papyrus letter this was found a few years ago and this is from the 7th century BC so in the pre-exilic period and it's it's in very nice handwriting my students over here can't quite see it but it says here the bottom line it says Jerusalem and there's not a Yid between the lammott and the map so this is really pre exotic spelling Oh Jerusalem yerushalaim is how they would have said it the I am comes later ok so this is a letter the word for letter in classical Hebrew is simply say fair which you know in modern Hebrew also means book and in classical Hebrew it also means book or book scroll but safer also means letter so if you send a letter to somebody you're sending something like this and this word safer is used here Samuel and kings interestingly an Esther which is a later book Persian period book it's also used in Hebrew inscriptions of the pre-exilic period in letters like this so say you know this is a letter that I'm sending to you to requisition some wine or something and so they use the word safer for a letter now at a certain point another word comes to be used for letter that more or less replaces it or supplements that are kind of edges into that same semantic area and the word is a garrote and this is the word you find in Nehemiah seven times in Chronicles six times and also an Esther so interestingly Esther uses both Esther uses the older word safer and also uses the newer word you Garrett Garrett is actually and this is good because I have a couple of this Erie ologist here this comes from an old babylonian word what is it a gear to a gear - okay so this comes from a Babylonian word that is taken up into Aramaic okay and from Aramaic it comes into Hebrew oh I did that yep that's good things now this is interesting first of all one of the interesting things is that in the post-exilic period in the Second Temple period Hebrew was became more or less a religious language and the vernacular speech eventually became Aramaic so the speech that people would do on a daily basis would be Aramaic Aramaic replaced Hebrew as the vernacular and so it is precisely because people are speaking Aramaic that these words from Aramaic this was originally from Akkadian but it was taken from Akkadian into Aramaic and from Aramaic it comes into Hebrew so that Aramaic provides the vehicle for these foreign words to come in and essentially replace in in late biblical hebrew these classical hebrew but that's but they don't replace them all together in every case because Esther uses both that's uses the old word and new word okay so this is a very simple example and we can tell that a garret is later because it's it's brought in through Aramaic at a time when people or when there are bilingual Aramaic Hebrew speakers which is what people were in the Second Temple period in the Persian period particularly okay so this is a simple example where you can see that the words that are used you know provide a kind of thumbprint for what phase of the language that is if you only find say fare like in Samuel and kings that's going to be indicative that this is classical Biblical Hebrew if you only a be Garrett like Nehemiah and Chronicles which we know from their content were written during the persian period then that's a marker for that but then something like esther can use both but the fact that they're using e garrett at all shows that this is a late biblical hebrew book so these are the kind of clues that we use now in our book the more interesting set of clues are the more kind of empirical or deeper rooted clues are things that are a little more subtle than just words replacing each other and this is one that i promised to my students from last time not only are their syntactic differences but those are too hard to explain to you this is a difference where a classical word was either forgotten or reinterpreted in the late period okay and so this this also shows us a kind of timeline where new meanings are attached to old words so the word yom means day in hebrew okay very common word because there's days every day of the week right the aam ending for yo mom is an adverbial ending and it ends up meaning daily or by day so you do something daily okay so the you know the the pillar of cloud will follow them by day and by night the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire will follow the Israelites in the wilderness by day and by night so uses the word yo mom says yo mom the Lyla daily and at night and this is the classical meaning with this with the word having this adverbial sense so it's used in Exodus numbers Deuteronomy using all these books now in late Biblical Hebrew this word becomes reinterpreted and from being an adverb it becomes a noun that's reinterpreted as meaning day time so instead of an adverb it's a noun and so now it can have things like the definite article in front of it hi yo mom the daytime you can't really say the daily well unless it's the name of a newspaper okay but daily is an adverb but the yo mom shows that it's being treated as a noun and the noun it now means daytime and it's used that way a couple of times in Jeremiah it's used in Ezekiel it's used in Nehemiah and interestingly it's also used in Qumran Hebrew which is the Hebrew of those Dead Sea Scrolls that I showed you before I showed you a biblical scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls we also have a lot of Scrolls that show documents written by that Dead Sea scroll community and a lot of those are in Hebrew and they show us a particular dialect of late Biblical Hebrew that we call Qumran Hebrew because chrome runs the place so we can see that this word means your mom this word means daytime in these texts that are either transitional or late and also really late arguably this reinterpretation of your mom is because they sort of forgot what the ending meant so it's a grammatical particle that makes a word adverbial but they forgot it it just kind of died okay so they didn't know what it meant and so they kind of reinterpreted and they used an aramaic form which which is y imam to assimilate to this hebrew word yo mam these weird I mean so they're speaking Aramaic and so they assimilate it to a similar looking and similar sounding Aramaic word that does mean day time so this also shows us the process by which Hebrew changed and it interestingly shows us that in late Biblical Hebrew they had forgotten aspects of the classical grammar of classical Biblical Hebrew and so they generate new meanings and assimilate assimilate things to Aramaic words or to Aramaic syntax and so forth oh good when I saw that this was in Jeremiah yeah this is another very interesting thing and this is something we also talked about in the book with some of the books of the Bible we can we can tell from their textual history from versions of these those books that are in the Dead Sea Scrolls sometimes versions that are preserved in the old Greek translation which is called the Septuagint we can tell that some of these books circulated in antiquity in different editions okay so for example the Book of Jeremiah was such a big hit that the publisher said okay we're going to come out with an expanded second edition this is what publishers do and so this is what happened The Book of Jeremiah circulated in a shorter form and in a longer form and it's pretty clear that the longer form is the later expanded edition of Jeremiah well there's two occurrences in Jeremiah I wanted both of them to be in the later expanded edition because that would be good for me because that would because the second edition is later and interestingly the second edition of Jeremiah does have a number of fingerprints that show the it's written in in a later phase than the first edition of Jeremiah in this case however I didn't get my wish because there's one daytime meaning in the old edition and one daytime meaning in the second edition but Jared but Jeremiah and Ezekiel are both transitional Biblical Hebrew so it doesn't upset me too much your mom it's both and classical yo mom your mom Delilah is when the pillar of cloud it's the meaning it's the same word it's the same grapheme but it's interpreted differently so the classical meaning is by day date and then later becomes reinterpreted into a noun meaning daytime it's good now let me just tell you I'm trying to pick easy examples but you see how hard that is to do so I'm not giving you any more complicated syntactic ones but this is a nice one okay with the question why was nehemiah there's what this meaning here in Nehemiah says hi yo mom and so that's clearly meaning it as a noun the day time there's two other uses in Nehemiah and it's hard for me to tell whether it's meaning day time as a noun or by day as an adverb so it's possible that these two meanings of merit Nehemiah were also reinterpreted like this one was in which case they would belong in this column and I think they use yo mom Val ila which becomes a fixed phrase and so it's a Nehemiah could have been reading that day time and night instead of by day and night so that's so it's hard to tell when it's a formula except how Nehemiah is understanding it okay good good good yes the example in the m9 it also Oh perfect so what is it saying yeah yeah so that's by yeah by day time is a boyo Marvel Ilah I'll just be your mom okay so if he's taking it as a noun he's kind of add verbalizing it which is really nice because then you see the these wheels within wheels of reinterpreting it but then he has to make sense of it in its original context yeah we didn't even use this example in our book no but Yann you my co-author uses it in another one of his articles but I think it's a really nice example because it's it's kind of explanatory and this is actually a picture of daytime this is a the symbol of Shama is the god of the Sun in O in Akkadian in Babylonian religion see you guys get some stuff here that's shamash is symbol you know that okay so this is this just gives you some insight into what kind of criteria what kind of evidence so we're not making it up but it is you know does require careful linguistic elucidation of you know what the word is being used for and how it's understood and how it's reinterpreted and how aramaic comes into it so the more you get into these examples you vote the more you get this whole panorama of the development of the language how it fits into the development of the history and the culture now let me give you a couple of other examples of other sorts of things I mentioned the old poetry so here's a nice here's my favorite example from the old poetry and there's lots of them but this is nice in the song of Deborah at the end one of the wise women who in the court of the Canaanite Queen who's the mother of Sisera who's the bad guy in the story and he's just been killed by Al yeah yes yes and where's the al I just saw her here yeah not you of the other yeah al okay you don't take credit you don't take credit for that so she's in a high so she's a heroine a wonderful savior of the people and wonderful story very sexy and there's a lot of sex and death it would make a wonderful miniseries so at the end the the wise woman advising sister his mother say trying to console her because she says sister hasn't come back yet she says aren't they not finding and dividing the spoil a young woman two young women for every young man spoil of colored cloth for cisserus spoil of colored embroidery two colored embroideries for the necks of the despoilers so she's saying don't worry they're just tarrying because they're despoiling the Israelites in fact he's dead because the al killed them sorry these things I've underlined are words that are used in this in the singular a young woman the word is Rahab and then Muhammad I am which is the duel of Rahab and then here you have colored embroidery the word is reka ma and then here's two colored embroidery that's the duel of Greek ma which is wreak mitai M now the interesting thing is anyone knows Hebrew knows that the duel is not a productive form in Hebrew there's certain fossilized forms like yad hand ya diam body a paired body parts yad I am Raju I am give at ISO so there's certain fixed forms that are used okay yeah there's certain fixed forms things that usually travel in twos like hands and stuff like that but it's not a productive form you can't generate a dual of any noun that you want but here it looks like they're generating the duo for all sorts of obscure words okay embroidered material and then you use the dual for that now we know that the dual is a productive form in older languages that are related to Hebrew like Canaanite the Canaanite language of Ugaritic giving you some more philology here in Northwest Semitic languages of the second millennium the dual is a productive form and you can use it for anything so this looks like a really old piece of grammar where the dual is still productive this either reflects a really early period of Hebrew where the duel was still productive which is not evidenced anywhere else or and this is my suspicion it's mimicking a Canaanite dialect spoken by Cicero's mother and and and her court where the duel was still productive but this is still really early because none of the Canaanite dialects of the first millennium have a productive duel so this is really early stuff so this is a nice little example and it's really nice that it's done here in kind of arguably in mimicking a foreigner where the duel is still productive but this is really early no one's ever noticed this before thank you I take great pride in that one this one everyone has noticed so this is this is one of the peace from the earliest archaic Biblical Hebrew here's a little piece from the latest which is Hellenistic period the Greek era and this is in the book of Daniel which is one of the latest books of the Hebrew Bible and I just want to show you that this description here when you hear the sound of the horn the pipe the and we don't these names are a little obscure the lyre the zipper the lute the flute and all kinds of music you shall fall down and worship the gold statue that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up so the stories of Daniel are set during the period of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and in the early Persian period but we can tell from the language and also from some of the into other internal references that this was written during the Greek period this was written in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC and this is a nice example because the words here for a lie well it's not really as if the first word is kathira Hebrew cut rose and kathira is a Greek word for a liar the second one sabka saath sabka in Hebrew is is a version of Greek sambuca which I thought was a kind of liqueur but in fact it's a small harp and then the third one Santi Lyon is from Greek solitaire on which is a large harp and then the fourth one that's underlined some somepony ah so it sounds like symphony this is Greek symphonia which means a bagpipe which I thought was a Scottish instrument or a double flute and this is a Greek double flute so this fourth word some pony ax maybe refers to this word because that's double fluid is in Greek so the interesting thing is and then let me say this part of Daniel is actually written in Aramaic but it uses these Greek loan words these Greek words for instruments instead of the Aramaic words why would they do that well if you're trying to describe a really fine royal orchestra you use the words that are fancier and in the Greek era the Hellenistic era using Greek was the using the kind of superpower language the language of wealth and culture and things like that which which lend this picture of the orchestra a kind of grandeur and prestige so there's actually a kind of literary impetus for using Greek words for these instruments instead of the ordinary aramaic words which no one would be impressed by exactly may we Madame may we yes exactly so you know if I'm ordering wine and I say oh there's so many yay you know this is fancy this is pompous this is grandeur exactly it's exactly so French is the it has been I'm not sure it is anymore the language of high culture of Oates Couture and in the Hellenistic period Greek was the language of high culture and so you use this to get that kind of French ambiance to it so the but but notice this gives away when it was written it was written in a period when Greek was the language of high culture which means this is the Hellenistic period so even though it says it's talking about King Nebuchadnezzar sorry about this Assyria lodgest it wasn't written during the time of the Babylonian Empire it was written during the Greek period so these are the kinds of things that give away the age of the different books of behavior Bible and one of the nice things that I like is that finding these details gets you more deeply into the nuances and the effects of each of these texts like in the case of the song of Deborah with the Cicero's mother's speech and here with the description of this grand orchestra question there's no musical note well there might be musical notation but we don't know how to read it actually in my department in Near Eastern Studies we used to have in Assyria lodgest who thought she could read some of these texts that may have been mathematical texts or astronomical tax you think they were musical texts okay so there were texts that had these weird notation and so the professor Ann Kilmer put out a CD it's a beautiful what's that [Laughter] okay this is a good transition to RK izing which is my neck last topic but she put out an LP with some someone who helped her and it's really beautiful but we don't really know if that was correct so there are probably musical notations but we don't really know how to read them good so my last the last thing I want to talk about is how late Biblical Hebrew and I think we can already see this from some of these examples is a classicizing language and what I mean there is that in late Biblical Hebrew this is to say in post-exilic times in the Persian and Greek periods when these books are written in Hebrew they're trying to write in classical Ebru okay but they don't always they don't consistently understand the syntax the style the you know implicit grammatical rules of classical Biblical Hebrew and so they end up making all these mistakes and reinterpreting things in ways that would have been inconceivable in classical times and and writing sentences that just seem weird to us because they're not in imitating classical Hebrew correctly one of the one of the results here is that each of the books that's written in late Biblical Hebrew has a slightly different way of imitating classical Hebrew so lay Biblical Hebrew isn't one thing it seems to be a kind of learn and task of these different scribes trying but failing to a certain degree to write classical Hebrew now this betrays a certain attitude that we have in in the Second Temple period towards the Classical period it is a period that one tries to emulate okay and another thing another I think more important thing that shows us is that they're reading the classical texts very closely very intently and by trying to emulate them and even try and even doing so in to the extent that they're actually Rhian her predict their misunderstanding and reinterpreting reanalyzing old forms and structures this is part of the process I would say of what we can call scriptural izing that is to say they're studying the book so intently that the that studying the text itself kind of turns the text in some respects into Scripture into that which you study as being authoritative both religiously linguistically culturally and the rest so the I'm not saying that the the lay biblical hebrew it's is the only cause for this but i think it's evidence for this it's evidence for the transformation of the classical text from being texts to being scripture to being that which you study intently and it's so important for you that everything you do is derived from it in one way or another and here we see that the language itself comes to be derived from it so this gesture of classicizing and the fact that it's an imperfect classicizing gives us a sense of the intensity with which these Second Temple scribes are reading and studying and trying to enter into and trying to reproduce the classical texts so this is where I want to end showing how this linguistic study ends up showing us the development of the Hebrew Bible from being a bunch of text to being a religious Scripture thank you [Applause] yes questions how much time okay few minutes for questions you find cultures that where they inscribe when they came back from Babylonia so they must have known you could take clay tablets and write stuff good with last yeah well this is this is one of the interesting things about what happens and it's already happening during the neo-assyrian period and then the neo-babylonian period and into the persian period you would think that they would be using clay tablets but aramaic becomes the lingua franca already of the assyrian empire and then the babylonian empire and then the persian empire and it's during the neo-babylonian and persian period that the Jews of Israel become Aramaic speakers so Aramaic and one of the reasons can tell me if this makes sense one of the reasons is precisely because Aramaic is first of all an alphabetic script and so it's much easier to learn how to read and it's written on papyrus which is much easier but much cheaper well we have the one I showed you it all has to do with the desert and the same thing with the Dead Sea Scrolls those happen to be preserved because they were out in the desert and some of those are parchment and some of those are papyrus it all has to do with the weather if it rains too much the stuff doesn't last but it's this era is a ssin of the whole Near East that it becomes this central thing and so that's why they're not using clay tablets in the Persian period good so job is probably one of these transitional books because it has some features of classical Hebrew and a number of features of late biblical hebrew and then it also has a lot of very interesting strange features of its own and i think i think the author of job was first of all it's an amazing book and he has an amazing vocabulary and i think i can't prove this but i think like shakespeare i think he made up a lot of words some words are only known from aramaic or from arabic cognates or from you know strange other semitic languages i think he was that yeah well he's depicted as being from Edom the land of boots but he's writing in hebrew but it's a really weird it's a very rich hebrew and i think this is a brilliant author who's making up new words like shakespeare did but it's but the only book that we have of that type of so this is a this is an example where each dialect is a little different once you get into the later period a song of songs is quite late it has a lot of Aramaic influence has a few Persian words in it might have one Greek word in it and it looks like a more vernacular kind of dialect it's not explicitly trying to be classical and in part this is because it's voluptuous love poetry which doesn't really have a classical analog but it's it's very late but it's very very beautiful yes oh I know you yeah this guy yes good okay good so this is a great professor of classics and I'm so glad I can actually answer this question the question is at least the last part of Daniel and this is my answer the last part of Daniel seems quite clearly to have been written during the Hasmonean period when Greek culture was a bad thing so doesn't that conflict a little bit with the idea that they're using these Greek instrument names to evoke high culture instead of the hated Greek culture the answer is the first half of Daniel chapters 1 through 6 were probably written in the 3rd century a hundred years before the Hasmonean period and so for then Greek as the language of culture has no problems at all did I get you oh yeah ok yeah yes yeah yes so we actually taught the Book of Daniel in a course that we taught a few times and it was so much fun this is Eric GRU and who's a great professor so we'll do this in clinic we'll have a whole class about this yes okay like we had Jerusalem yeah the question this is a little technical but Jerusalem in Hebrew you shall I am that I am ending looks and smells like the dual ending like reek reek my reek might I am raka raka might I am I am it's not though so we don't know what it is so people call it the pseudo dual ending which means we don't know what it but there's not to jerusalem's right so the medieval punctuate errs put that I am in there even though there's not the right letter for that to be there there I think one or two times in the late biblical hebrew has the yard which is nice yes yes I would say in some respects that example of your mom which is they've kind of forgot the meaning of daily or by day but so they're using a classical word that they've sort of forgotten what it means so they reinterpret it or reanalyze it that's a kind of a simple example of classicizing wait it's it's as if I'm using what was it where for where for and I used it wrong so I'm classicizing but I'm not doing it precisely correctly and so you can tell that it's not really classic because I'm misusing it or at least I'm using it with a later reinterpreted meaning and not with the original classical meaning so the young mom is a simple example of that but there's a lot of other places where they try to emulate verbal forms and syntax for example they use I'm looking at the graduate students here that they'll use the cohort ative in a converted form vêoc to law or something like that which you can't do in classical c they know this you can't do in classical but they've forgotten the nuances of these grammatical forms and so they use them and they think they're right in classical but they're not getting it right that's why it's classicizing and it but it shows you their attitude toward the classical language that they want to write in that because that's important it's valuable their own their own language isn't as powerful or certainly it's not as holy and so this is the idea of scriptural izing betrays an idea that the original classical language is the holy language the Lazo and ha'qodesh and so you see that development there yes question thank you that's because we're right okay that's because we're right and the others are wrong who's this Oh Thomas Palmer good friend of mine I resolved this because I love Thomas Romer and he was here last month and on this issue I'm right and he's wrong but over enough red wine we might be able to reach so this this is this is a problem in my field one of the because he's a very intelligent and he's at the coalition if Haas he's a brilliant guy and he's got excellent taste in wine these the sorts would this whole thing about linguistic history historical linguistics they barely do that in the Linguistics department here at Berkeley it's regarded as a very 19th century thing to do and this similarly in the field of biblical studies it's not taught very many places it's not taught anywhere in Europe it's only taught at a couple places in the States and a couple places in Israel I say if you look at the language if you agree that we have linguistic texts and that linguistic criteria have a certain weight because that's all we have is texts they're mostly mostly what we have is text so if you grant that language has a history then it's incumbent upon you to try to ascertain that history and use that as your very first criterion he would say we don't really know the history of Hebrew that well and I would say read our book and then tell me that and then we'll have a big jug of red wine and talk about it some more yes he's using other kinds of arguments and so my art my argument is that those other kinds of arguments should come second or third they should be secondary or tertiary arguments and the argument from language should come first and I don't think he would disagree with that I mean it's so you know after the second bottle of wine I think I could get him I [Laughter] gave him a copy of the book I hope you read it on the plane ride home though we're gonna work on this and and this is scholarly conversation is about and he's one of the people that I can talk to and have a conversation without it becoming a kind of sectarian battle he's a brilliant guy Thomas Wilmer yeah College do for asking exactly the right questions I would say on the basis just of language that this is you know old pretty oh pretty darn old pretty darn old and then I would say you know it's before the floor wit of classical Hebrew so we're talking about early 9th 10th 11th century BC and then I would say in within the content of the poem they're talking about a battle between these try elements of Israel and not all of the tribes show up and so that some of them get cursed because they because they didn't have a mechanism to make people come which means there's not a central government yet so this is a tribal kind of a syphilis society it's a tribal society there's no king there's no central standing army there's no central institutions so this looks like a poem that that originated before the rise of kingship before David and Saul and Solomon and those people so that also makes it look 10th 11th century BC that's pretty darn early the song of Deborah in judges five but I would say the other poems that have those those markers of archaic biblical hebrew are from roughly the same period so that's that's how old so that's a good and the the second part of your question there's these old poems are short enough so that they could have been transmitted orally for a certain amount of time and then obviously at some point they're written down and then they're combined in these classical tack they're inserted into these classical texts perhaps by the people that wrote the classical texts who inserted them in at these key moments were praise and victory and stuff or someone dying Moses or Jacob dying so I think there probably is but we can't really tell but a certain period of oral transmission makes sense because they're short enough to be able to do that okay we're done lecture install is able to evoke something but Britto generates something really seen that's the academic lecture with : response thank you

Channel: Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies

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Id: BapR4R0HRcw

Length: 70min 49sec (4249 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2019