DH proposes that Biblical Hebrew is a mischsprache, that Hebrew developed in layers through collision with other cultures. The second pillar of DH says that this development left traces in the language and style of each of the documents. DH says that while the four documents were ripped apart and then enfiladed back together so that nobody realized for centuries what their origin was, nevertheless the language layering features and style of writing were preserved and that clever men figured it out centuries later.
This runs smack into contradictory evidence about the history of Hebrew and other languages.
The true description for how new languages develop under the mutual influence of multiple languages is sometimes called creolization. Not just the word usage but also the grammar changes. (Notice how the two base rules of SWLT are addressed in this description.) There is always an interim point where the creole language looks like it has a deviant grammar compared to its contributors; if it survives it develops a different characteristic grammar.
English is a creole language with its origin in the Celtic languages used in Britain preceding the Roman and Germanic invasions. It gathered material from the Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Norse languages. The Norman invasion brought French influence, including “hard” and “soft” versions of the letters c and g, and then we watch it go through its grammatical changes through Wace and Malory to Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Georgette Heyer, etc.
Yiddish is also a creole with its roots in the Old High German of Europe. Brought to Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great, it acquired Russian particles and suffixes, among other things. Emigres to America further produced the creole Yeshivish, which adds technical terms from Talmud study and also re-imagines their meaning. After its bearers passed through Ellis Island, it acquired English words spoken in a New York accent, but grammatically Yeshivish tends to resemble Yiddish. You can hear Yeshivish spoken in R. Dovid Grossman’s recordings of his lectures on Babylonian Talmud at the Harvard website.
The main issue of creolization is that grammar thing. While a creole develops, its grammar changes. If Biblical Hebrew creolized between 800 and 400 BCE, its grammar would have changed and this would show up in JEDP. The grammar is, however, consistent throughout the Hebrew material in Tannakh, with modal morphologies and use of the narrative past as defined in Dr. Cook’s dissertation.
The only way DH can explain the consistent grammar throughout Torah is that their incompetent editor was a competent grammarian and rewrote deviant forms to agree with the language that he spoke. However, redactors would not have known how to produce good grammar in Biblical Hebrew unless they learned it as a first language. The people who transmitted Torah down to post-Captivity times probably did not have grammar books.
The same is true of every writer responsible for some Hebrew post-Torah book in Tannakh. They all had to speak and think in Biblical Hebrew to write using the same grammar that Torah uses, which they do.
Using external evidence, we can understand this in the light of the succession of cuneiform texts that have survived. In Jacobson’s discussion of how we found out that the Kings List was a compilation with fudging of the numbers, he points out grammatical differences in the city king list sources, and the compilation made by Ur III scribes. The vernacular of the post-Gutian period didn’t use the same grammar as the pre-Gutian period. The same thing happened in the 1700s BCE when the prequel was added.
We have word lists in cuneiform for multiple versions of ancient Semitic languages. But if there were any grammars, they did not survive that I have heard of to date; tell me if you know of one that was compiled back then, as opposed to Cyrus Gordon’s grammar of Ugaritic from the 1960s. Such a sharp contrast in preservation suggests there were no grammars. The bad grammarians of the kings list could not produce the right text because they hadn’t learned it on the street, neither had their teachers, and so on for decades into their history. This same argument works with the grammar of Amos and Hoshea.
The DH pillar of style and language has to drop the concept of language layering because it is based on a fallacy and also makes extraordinary claims that don’t jibe with studies in linguistics.
Now let’s look at the consequence of the mischsprache concept, which has implications for some of the oldest work done on DH.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
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