Late Templar Hebrew

Hebrew students - and many Northwest Semitists generally - start with the Bible. Such students soon learn of dialects within the Bible; upon which, they are told that these fall into diachronic sequence. That is: there's a pre-exilic "Classical Biblical Hebrew", and a "Late Biblical Hebrew". The "Late" dialect permeates Nehemiah, Chronicles, and the Hebrew parts of Ezra - which are known to be closely allied; and also Daniel 1, Daniel 8-12, and Esther. (The rest of Daniel and Ezra are Imperial Aramaic, famously.)

Following all Biblical variants of Hebrew, we have evidence for the language's survival in at least two spoken dialects. Uri Mor argued for a Qumran dialect as of the 100s BC. Aaron Koller further proposed a Shephelah dialect, perhaps after absorption of early Palestinian Aramaic; this became Mishnaic. Although these dialects evolved from Classical Biblical Hebrew and sometimes even preserved traits from the spoken language of Samaria.

In 2013, Ian Young - who had agreed with the CBH>LBH consensus - publicly altered his opinion. He confirmed the "Late" use of Hebrew in this cluster of books and book-sections. However he did not find such density of "Late" features in Habakkuk, Joel, or Zechariah, all self-declared as postexilic. He also didn't find this density in "Second Isaiah" 44-46. I have to wonder about certain of the Psalms as well.

Young instead finds "Late" features in (supposedly) earlier books - and in inscriptions at Arad, 600 BC. Where he confirms the Isaiah Scroll sometimes moving toward the "Late" features... he finds the movement sporadic, and sometimes (if more rarely) in the opposite direction.

"Late" Hebrew, then, isn't late. It is just idiosyncratic (in Young's term, "Peripheral"). Maybe not even that. What's idiosyncratic is Chronicles and its allied texts affecting this style. And then Daniel and Esther picking up on it, but those texts are known to be weird. UPDATE 11/28/22: Here's how weird is Esther. To be called out as absent from this calculus is Qohelet "Ecclesiates".

What I am seeing is a continuum of Hebrew before Exile; and, after Exile, a scribal jargon. A post-exilic school was able to force this "orthography" upon the books its members composed themselves, and upon allies in Diaspora. The school could not force its language upon the wider canon - which, we all agree, was composed outside, in time or in space or both.

I think it's the Jerusalem faction clustered at the Second Temple. Other scribes remained at work, copying the other Hebrew books.