Fact-Checking the Torah -- Aramaic it ain't

Remember on the Documentary Hypothesis part of this thread, I trashed the concept of mischsprache. 

Now, if you read everything on this part of the blog, you are going to think I am beating a dead horse in this post, but I come to bury the horse, not beat it.

So once again, turn it over and over. I'm slowly going through Talmud Bavli Berakhot testing my concept of its orality and I come across this on page 3b.

 כו אֶלָּא אָמַר רָבָא: תְּרֵי נִשְׁפֵי הָווּ  נְשַׁף לֵילְיָא וְאָתֵי יְמָמָא, נְשַׁף יְמָמָא וְאָתֵי לֵילְיָא. 

Rather, Rava said: There are two times referred to as neshef, and the word can refer to either evening or morning. [understand] “the day moves past [neshaf ] and the night arrives.” [Williamson Talmud translation]

The Williamson Talmud explains in accordance with an Aramaic root. And some people who used to be fans of DH are going to think maybe they gave up too easily to my persuasion, because it certainly looks as if the Hebrew of Psalms 119:147 has been doped by Aramaic.

Which ignores three things.

a) Two languages can sometimes use identical spelling to get identical meaning, no matter how long ago they split off from the family tree, and without one being adopted into the other.

b) Jastrow's Talmudic dictionary shows the adoption of Hebrew words into the Aramaic of Talmud. Some of them are verbs; some are technical terms like Shabbat.

c) The claim assumes a history that not only is not supported by archaeology, but archaeologists rejected it starting in the 1990s, and it also does not agree with the history of Tannakh as the Jewish oral tradition, or the evidence that the Samaritan Pentateuch is a languishing version of the same oral tradition.

There are lots of spurious claims that Tannakh includes Aramaic words in books other than Esther, Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah, but the claims don't recognize how oral traditions work. They arise from a concept called mischsprache which underlies Documentary Hypothesis. It is not the same as the concept of creolization that produced Yiddish, English, Yeshivish, and the language of Samaritan scripture. Mischsprache would claim, for example, that use of min in Tannakh only occurs because of the Babylonian Captivity when Biblical Hebrew stopped being the street language. There are two problems with that.

First is that when people migrate to a new country and their children are raised in a language other than the one their parents grew up with, the kids only use terms from the mame loshn in a suitable context. So Talmud uses Shabbat in related contexts even if the rest of the text is in Aramaic, and Yeshivish uses Talmudic technical terms in related contexts in English. It doesn’t insert random Hebrew or Aramaic words into the English speech of the kids once they are adults. 

In fact 130 out of 678 occurrence of min are in Esther, Daniel, Ezra, or Nehemiah. Out of those 130, 14 occur in Aramaic expressions in Ezra and 9 are in Hebrew expressions in Ezra, while of the 90 occurrences in Daniel, 18 are in Hebrew expressions. In the other two books they are in Hebrew expressions. So the vast majority of occurrences of min in Tannakh are in Hebrew expressions. 

The fact that Biblical Hebrew also uses mi but the Aramaic doesn't, is no proof that min is Aramaic. Hebrew also has the ancient nifal binyan; Aramaic has lost it. Hebrew also has a lamed heh verb class that is missing from Aramaic; the fact that it has the same endings in the imperative as the Aramaic lamed yod or lamed vav verb classes doesn't mean that those parts are Aramaic. They derive from the common Semitic ancestor which was lamed yod/vav not lamed heh.

Second is that Samaritan Pentateuch also has min. This has to result from the oral tradition of the Samaritans, which survived the split in the kingdom after 930 BCE and the Assyrian hegemony, which occurred before Nevuchadnetsar conquered Assyria. Some of its differences from Jewish Torah are examples of recognized patterns in both languages and oral traditions that become divided from their source. It’s the verbal equivalent of the Samaritan kohanim having one genetic linkage different from their distant relatives, the kohanim of the Jews. But the uses of min are in the same places in Jewish Torah and Samaritan Pentateuch. If you want to check up on that, the Resources page and bibliography link to online versions of both.

The differences between Samaritan Pentateuch and Jewish Torah have two major roots. 

One is the natural divergence of the content because the Samaritan culture was divided from the Judean culture under the Assyrian hegemony, even more strongly than after the split in the kingdoms. Archaeological evidence supports the "iron curtain" concept while the tales of Athaliah and of Hezekiah's invitation to observe Passover show the permeability of the north/south border before the Assyrian invasion.

Another is that the grammar of Samaritan Pentateuch suggests that by the time of the oldest manuscript, around 1000 CE or so, the Samaritan dialect of Hebrew had creolized with Arabic; that took about 300 years after the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land. This led to the Arabic features in Zev Hayyim's Samaritan Grammar; the Samaritan Pentateuch does not preserve Second Temple features or relate directly to Aramaic, as Hayyim tries to claim.

But the real kicker is that the concept of mischsprache is directly related to history as seen in scripture or in archaeology. And in the 21st century, DH has given up on discussing historical evidence. There's good reason for that. Archaeology has not (so far) turned up any samples of JEDP, and it argues in opposition to DH. The retreat from historical concepts isn't complete yet; there are still supporters of DH who try to relate it to archaeology. They have had to adopt the interpretationism outlook, however, which says as long as they feel like saying it, nobody can argue against them. That's not science. That's Steven Colbert truthiness.

When you find somebody saying that there are Aramaisms in Tannakh in Hebrew concepts, read their work carefully. 

a) If they espouse DH, it's probably pre-21st century DH concepts; they are out of touch with the modern view. 

b) Look at their linguistic references; John Cook's work is probably missing. 

c) They probably don't refer to Samaritan scripture; they probably wrote before Walton's polyglot and von Gall's critical edition went online. 

Not having the evidence is not the same thing as being right. 

It's another case of tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, because knowledge has also changed. It's the pits trying to keep up, but ignoring the changes makes you irrelevant.