Important finding provides proof Bible written much earlier than scholars believe

A piece of pottery is providing a new insight.

Finding such an early example of Hebrew makes it possible the Bible could have been written several centuries before the current estimates.

"The inscription is similar in its content to biblical scriptures, but it is clear that it is not copied from any biblical text.

The inscription itself, which was written in ink on a 15 cm X 16.5 cm trapezoid pottery shard, was discovered a year and a half ago at excavations that were carried out by Prof. Yosef Garfinkel at Khirbet Qeiyafa near the Elah valley. "This text is a social statement, relating to slaves, widows and orphans. It uses verbs that were characteristic of Hebrew, such as asah ("did") and avad ("worked"), which were rarely used in other regional languages. Particular words that appear in the text, such as almanah ("widow") are specific to Hebrew and are written differently in other local languages," Prof. Galil explained.

The deciphered text:

1' you shall not do [it], but worship the [Lord].

2' Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an]

3' [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and]

4' the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king.

5' Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger.

 The find demonstrates that Biblical Hebrew was spoken and writen in in David's time,and dealing with the same issues that the Bible deals in, and in the same style and language.

 More importantly it undercuts the argument that Tanach must have all be written around the same time because the language of the different books that cover over a thousand year period, is so similar. We now have the inscription of Chizkia's tunnel, the silver scroll with the birkat cohanim written at the end of the First Temple Period and this new inscription - all in the same style of pure Biblical Hebrew. To me it shows the existence of diglossia - the official language of the court and the elite and the colloquial language of the common folk. The former tends to be preserved, especially when there is a "Holy Book", much in the same way that the Korah preserved the Standard Arabic for the past 1400 years. This fact can be extrapolated from the quotations within the Tanach text that serve to categorize the speaker, when that speaker is deliberately shown to speak the common dialect and the folk language. Recongizing the change from the "high" to "low" dialects is an important interpretative technique.

Here is an abridged quote from the book, Dawn of Redemption", that illustrates how this works:" The book of Yonah is full of unusual expressions and words. Many of them are more typical of later Mishnaic rather than pure Biblical Hebrew and others appear to be imported from Arameic, a related and widely spoken language at that time, the lingua franca of the ancient world. A list of 15 of these can be found in the introduction to the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) translation of Yonah and three of them are found in our verse.

1. How come you slumber. In classical Hebrew this would be phrased as "ma lkha ki nirdamta". The form "ma lkah nirdam", without preposition and the present participle, is found only in Ezekiel 18:22 and is typical of Mishnaic Hebrew.

2. Give us thought - an Arameic form of the word as found in the Arameic portion of Daniel 6:4. It is not the Hebrew form of Pslams 40:18.

3. Captain - Rav Hachovel. The usage is extremely peculiar. If the chief of rope pullers is intended, as most commentators suggest, the term should be Gadol Hachovlim. Rashi in Ezekiel 27:8 suggests that this is the term used for the fellow who commands the wheel at the stern and directs the ship. Still, the word Rav is widely used in the Mishna to mean great but it is never used that way in Tanakh, where it always means numerous (See Vilna Gaon's commentary to Proverbs 3:3); this example seems to have been missed by the JPS translation).

The reader therefore is faced with a two-fold problem. First, we much account for the general tendency of the book to use unusual words or expressions. Secondly, we must determine whether we must approach these linguistic peculiarities as examples of general tendency or as specific and intentional clues to the author's intention in that particular case.

There are three approaches to these questions that are consistent with Torah and Tradition.

1. Although the language of the Bible is remarkably preserved along a range of Biblical compositions spanning almost a thousand years, it is possible that a certain process of language development was taking place. Ultimately it evolved into the language that is familiar to us from the Mishna. Yonah being a late work from the end of the First Temple period reveals the beginning of this process of change; similar deviations are regularly found in other late works - Ezekiel, Esther, Ezra/ Nehemiah, Daniel and Chronicles. If so, we should not ascribe too much significance to deviation form "pure" Biblical patterns. Were we to do so, we might over-interpret and end up with meanings that the author never intended.

2. Yonah is written in the so-called Northern dialect (see G. A. Rendsburg, Morphological Evidence for Regional Dialects in Ancient Hebrew, in Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew, ed. W. R. Bodine, Eisenbrauns, In., 1992). It has long been proposed, primarily to explain stylistic and linguistic peculiarities of the Song of Devorah, a Northern prophetess (Judges 5), that the language of the Northern tribes differed somewhat from the reigning dialect of Judea. The linguistic maps of the ancient Middle East show multiple overlapping language belts stretching from the Summerian in the far North-East to Amharic in Ethiopia. The middle of the map is dominated by Arameic as it slowly transitions into Hebrew. There are indications from the Tanach itself (see Judges 12:5-6) to the existence of this putative Northern dialect. In this view, we also should also not ascribe too much significance to linguistic deviations in the book of Yonah, a prophet from the North.

3. As in our English, there may have been a distinction between literary and colloquial language, often termed di-glossia. It is reasonable to suppose that both co-existed during the Biblical period. Professor Steven (not Saul) Lieberman suggested that the elite spoke and wrote Biblical language while the common-folk spoke a variety of Mishnaic Hebrew (Response, Jewish Languages, 1978, 21-8). The discovery of the pure Biblical inscription in the Siloam aqueduct constructed at the time of Hezekiah appears to argue against this theory (See http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jspartid=713&letter=S&search=aqueduc t). However, if true, use of colloquial expressions within the literary matrix would be intentional and must be noted and interpreted.  We will adopt this approach here.

What could the use of colloquiallisms and Arameisms signify in this verse? It could, of course, serve to characterize the Gentile captain as speaking a foreign language (saying to us that even a non-Jew recognized that the storm came from God while Yonah continued to resist Him) or to call attention to Yonah's Northern origins at this critical juncture...etc "

Comments

[pierre]

I really want to follow this, thanks for posting it. BTW if you haven't picked up R. Joshua Berman's "Created Equal", he makes many indirect but profound and powerful suggestions towards the unity of Torah. This essay has a few of them in short form;
http://createdequalthebook.com/Publications/The_Case_for_God.pdf

[Yona]

You may be interested in seeing: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/januaryweb-only/13-11.0.html