Monday, November 28, 2022

Pseudo-Classical Hebrew

Jan Joosten has a fine article in academia.edu, "A Pseudo-Classicism in Esther". That's the quasibiblical book in our Bibles but not Qumran's. The article isn't just about Esther but about all the texts in the various dialects in Hebrew as of the Qumran / Hasmonaean era.

As asides, we learn that Qohelet is in its own Hebrew, which assuredly is not that of the First Temple (nor of the Valediction) but also is not that of the Second Temple. Esther, by contrast, is more Chronicles / Nehemiah in language - although, unlike Chronicles / Nehemiah, Esther doesn't try to ape the real Hebrew of the olden days. But there is one exception: the word for "except".

There was in Torah a Hebrew term for "besides". This is lbd mn. It looks like lbr mn in Imperial Aramaic; in fact, I'd wager that Aramaic had spawned this from lbd mn in the Late Bronze Age. Problem (for later Jews): these look the same in Herodian Script, which has transcibed Hebrew and Aramaic from 50 BC to the present freakin' day. Actually they looked too much alike in the Hebrew of the earlier, Ptolemaic period: so we see Hellenophone scribes translate lbd mn to plhn. But those same scribes weren't idiots and didn't like how, say, Exodus 12:37 looked; so instead of the real meaning "not counting children" the LXX has "excepting baggage".

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