So I was reading Devarim last Shabbos in my own version, Narrating the Torah, and came across a comment I made. I've seen it before but obviously my brain cells were too occupied to realize what it meant.
It is a comment on Samaritan Pentateuch, which is available free online in two versions, Walton's "London" Polyglot (uses the Gezer script) and August Freiherr von Gall's critical edition (uses the Aramaic ("square") script).
The comment has to do with the Documentary Hypothesis' claim that Biblical Hebrew is a mischsprache incorporating Aramaic forms as a result of hybridization during the Captivity.
In fact, Biblical and Talmudic Aramaic or Neo-Babylonian is a hybrid of real Aramaic and Akkadian. It uses the lettering of Aramaic, with the full guttural set that Akkadian lost during the Gutian takeover, but the conjugations use their Akkadian vowels. On the other hand, Neo-Babylonian never did recover the nifal binyan present in Akkadian and Biblical Hebrew from the start. It gained words from Hebrew, but not grammar.
Biblical Hebrew, on the other hand, is an ancient Semitic language with many of the features of Old Akkadian, such as epistemics and other modals. I discuss this in detail in my Hebrew lessons.
So Biblical Hebrew is not a mischsprache formed from the collision of languages in the Nebuchadnetsar era; Neo-Babylonian is the mischsprache.
And Samaritan Hebrew is also a mischsprache. The Samaritan Pentateuch has all the same narratives as Jewish Torah. It has about 90% of the same words. One reason for the difference is something called regularization. When you transmit material verbally instead of in writing, each narration risks changes that make sense to the narrator and audience, because all languages change over time. When a narrator forgets the exact word to use, she is likely to use something similar that has a high frequency at the time she is retelling the story. She may also re-use a word from nearby in the story she is re-telling.
When enough time has gone by, grammar also begins to change, often to simplify. For example, English conjugations are simpler than their Norman-French or Anglo-Saxon ancestors. During hybridization, as with Neo-Babylonian, conjugations look like both their parents for a while, and then the new descendant develops its own characteristic grammar.
This never happened in Biblical Hebrew. The grammar of Chronicles is the same as the grammar of the rest of Pentateuch -- that of the ancient Semitic languages, not Neo-Babylonian or Mishnaic Hebrew.
It did happen in Samaritan Hebrew. The surviving manuscripts have grammatical changes in them compared to Jewish Torah; the changes do not reflect either Mishnaic Hebrew or Neo-Babylonian. A classics scholar named Ze'ev ben Hayyim worked with Samaritans and the description they gave him led him to think that the way the manuscripts used Hebrew was a survival of the Second Temple period.
That made no sense to me. I thought it might be a survival of Assyrian, so I studied Delitzsch's book, which is online. It was no help at all.
Not until I went through several books on Arabic grammar that I found online, did I find the features that ben Hayyim described for verbs in Samaritan Hebrew.
One issue he did not discuss, is changing the spelling of el, alef lamed, to ayin lamed. The Hebrew spelling looks like the Arabic definite article; it is never agglutinated, which is required for the Arabic definite article. The changed spelling resembles Arabic ila, "to". The manuscripts have altered spelling that people who spoke Arabic could not tolerate, it was just too disconcerting.
The Masoretic text of Jewish Tannakh footnotes vowel issues and qeri, it does not change the body of the text. The Jews regarded the text as canonical; the Samaritans did not.
All the surviving Samaritan manuscripts date after 1000 CE, that is, 300 years after the Muslim conquest. 300 years is how long it took English to develop out of the hybridization of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. 300 years is how long it took the Pelishtim/Ahiyyawa to develop Ionian Greek out of the language that they wrote in Linear B. 300 years is how long the post-Exodus Israelites had for developing the Gezer script out of Ugaritic before the Sea Peoples destroyed Ugarit. 300 years is a reasonable period for the Samaritans to hybridize their version of Hebrew with Arabic.
I'm pretty sure the people who invented Documentary Hypothesis never accessed Samaritan material. It's not just the wording or language; there are other claims in DH that don't work, because the Samaritans are ideal candidates to produce the E text -- and they did nothing of the kind. I did a verse by verse comparison of Jewish Torah to Samaritan Pentateuch that I call The Real Difference, and if the DH people had seen what I saw, they could not logically have said what they said.
But there's precious little logic in DH. It's an absolute Conjunction Fallacy or Linda problem based on false factual claims and false logic. Nobody can tell me differently without proving they've done the homework I've done.
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