Class and a Lecture

Day 6: June 23, 2009

Today is my mom's birthday, and I wish her a happy one.

Just a short blog today. I slept well and my body is used to things now.

Class was a little more difficult today, but all goes well. I'm getting better!

After studying in the afternoon and a light super, Randall Buth, director of the Biblical Language Center and my CoHeLeT colleague, gave a lecture on the history of the Hebrew language at 7:00. He planned to go 40 minutes with 20 minutes for questions, but lecture and discussion lasted until 9:00. It was held at the reception center on an outdoor veranda that overlooks a great valley and the hills of Jerusalem, which is just on the other side.

The lecture was excellent. I took notes and won't tell you everything, but let me give just one of the valuable lessons. When I was in seminary, NT scholarship taught that the Jews in Israel did not speak Hebrew, but only Aramaic and Greek. Further, the Hebrew of the Mishnah (written about AD 200; Google it, if you want more information) was an artificial language used only by scholars. So, when we read passages in the NT that say someone spoke in "Hebrew," we were taught that they meant Aramaic. This teaching had its origin in a brilliant scholar named Geiger. He was wrong.

Actually, many Jews in Jesus' day were tri-lingual: Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew. More than that, they new two levels of Hebrew: a spoken language, like the Hebrew of the Mishnah, and a written language like the Hebrew of the Bible in the time after Jeremiah, (about 500 BC). Proof for this is now pretty well established.

For example, Randall pointed out that in Josephus, Jewish Wars, 5.272, Josephus tells how the Jews had lookouts to warn the people when the Romans would hurl large stones. The people would run for cover and were able to resist the Roman "missiles." Josephus, who wrote in Greek, says they yelled, "o uios erkhetai," which means "the son is coming!" Of course at first this doesn't make any sense. However, the Hebrew for "a stone is coming!" is "eben ba'a." If you imagine in the excitement that listeners didn't hear the first and last vowels, the Hebrew expression becomes, "ben ba," which sounds just like a real sentence meaning, "a son is coming!" Trying this in Aramaic does not work at all. The Aramaic equivalent of "a stone is coming!" would be "kepha atha." So, it appears that these warnings were in Hebrew and these warnings were given to all the people, including the commoners, inside the walls of Jerusalem. The language of choice to address all the people was Hebrew, not Aramaic.

This information has been known since about 1988 at least, but many NT scholars are still giving misinformation here. I used to myself! But no more. Incidentally, to counteract the warnings, the Romans began to paint the stones black, which made them harder to see and thus more liable to cause damage. There are many things to learn here.

Blessings!