G. Herbert Livingston
[G. Herbert Livingston is Professor of Old Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Asbury, Kentucky. He is the author of The Pentateuch in its Cultural Environment, from which this article was taken.]
Though scholars a few centuries ago thought that the Hebrew language was directly given by God without human antecedents, the Bible never makes such a claim nor does the information now available support it. It is now known that, like the English language, Hebrew is the child of several language parents.
The rich literature in non-Hebrew languages now available has clarified the meaning of many words in the Bible that for centuries were beyond the understanding of translators. The same holds true for phrases, idioms, technical terms, and syntax forms. All the mysteries of difficult words in the Pentateuch have not yet been unveiled, but progress is being made.
All of the languages in the ancient Near East may be conveniently grouped under two headings: Semitic and non-Semitic. That is to say, there are nearly a dozen languages in the eastern Mediterannean area that exhibit the same “family” characteristics. This family has taken its name from the Biblical Shem, the forebear of the Hebrew nation. It has been pointed out that the easiest way to account for all of the similarities and differences in the family is to presuppose a common “mother” language, often called “Proto-Semitic.”
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The second group has no common denominator except that it is non-Semitic, Hittite stems from the Indo-European family (Greek, Indic, etc.), whereas Hurrian seems to be “Caucasoid.” Relations between these families are not clear. Egyptian has a number of similarities to Semitic; but if it is finally to be related to that family, a number of very significant alterations must have taken place. Sumerian, most tantalizingly, cannot be related to any known language family.
For a family tree of the languages, see the end of this article.
The Mesopotamian Valley
The Sumerian Language
During the nineteenth century, a people gradually came to light whose language was totally unknown from any source. The language of this people, the Sumerians, quite unlike that of any other, was neither Semitic nor Indo-European, nor Egyptian in character. Their language has been classed as agglutinative (meaning the combining or running together of old words into compounds, but still retaining the original meaning of each part), and it is thus similar to Turkish, Hungarian, and Finnish. Otherwise, it is not like any of these three just named.
The Sumerian language was a living, spoken form of speech from before 3500 B.C. to about 2050 B.C.; then it became a dead, classical language. Fortunately, the language, though dead, was studied by the scribes of the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Elamites, the Hurrians, the Hittites and the Canaanites. Basically, it was from the Babylonian and the Assyrian literature that the Sumerian language came to light.
The story of how the Sumerian language was recovered is an exciting one. In 1850, an Irishman, Edward Hincks, suspected that behind the newly deciphered Akkadian was an earlier language. He knew that the main trait of Semitic languages (of which Akkadian was a member) was the stability of consonants and the instability of vowels. The cuneiform syllabic system (to be described in the next section) had both stable consonants and stable vowels, but none of the syllabic sign values could be tied to Semitic words. In 1855, H. C. Rawlinson said he had found non-Semitic inscriptions on bricks and tablets from Nippur. The next year Hincks observed that the new language was agglutinative, but thought it was Scythic or a variety of Akkadian.
It was not until thirteen years later that Oppert, a Frenchman, tied the new language to the Sumer mentioned in Akkadian inscriptions, and suggested the name Sumerian for them; but for many years most other scholars continued to call the language “Akkadian.”
Until 1877, most of the information available about Sumerian came
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from bilingual lists that had Sumerian words and phrases with their supposed equivalent in Akkadian. Also, there were Sumerian texts matched by Akkadian translations. But the translations were poor, sometimes farfetched; so when genuine Sumerian material was found, scholars could not read them. It was not until two decades ago that an adequate grammar was devised, though thousands of Sumerian tablets and fragments had been known from excavations in Iraq since the turn of the century.
To date, about one quarter of a million tablets and fragments have been discovered. Because the clay tablets were unbaked for the most part, they break easily. About 95 percent of the tablets are economic texts, the business documents of everyday life. Most of this group of tablets have been easy to translate, but only a few are now published. Some of the tablets date to at least 3000 B.C. and perhaps earlier. About 1 percent of the total are literary texts of poetry dealing with religious and ethical themes. Only about half of these tablets have been published. The literary texts date to about 1750 B.C. and were mostly found at Nippur. The concepts in this material molded the thinking of a large part of the paganism against which the Old Testament protests.
The Akkadian Language
The Akkadians spoke a Semitic language that belongs to the eastern branch of this family of speech. Sargon I, who put together the first empire in Mesopotamia during the third millennium B.C., spread this language far and wide. Later it divided into two dialects: Babylonian and Assyrian.
Akkadian is the earliest recorded Semitic language and became known from the decipherment of cuneiform inscriptions written in three languages on monuments at Persepolis and on the rock of Bihistun in the Zagros Mountains east of Babylon. The Englishman, H. C. Rawlinson, published the first translated Akkadian in 1851; and from that time a new realm of knowledge about the ancient Near East was revealed to the world.
The branch of Akkadian called Babylonian became prominent during the empire established by Hammurabi about 1728 B.C. An extensive literature was produced, of which the Code of Hammurabi is most famous. It was found in 1901 at Susa. Some of the older Sumerian myths were rewritten in a much expanded form, but most of the clay tablets found from this period are magical in nature.
Written examples of what is known as Middle Babylonian are quite rare. The Tell el-Amarna letters found in Egypt do show that in the fourteenth century B.C., at least, Akkadian had become the international language of diplomacy in the ancient Near East. There are a few tablets from the Kassite regime that reveal something about Akkadian during
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the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries.
When Nebuchadnezzar set up the Neo-Babylonian empire at the end of the seventh century, he had most royal inscriptions written in the ancient Babylonian language style; but some of the contemporary vernacular manages to shine through. The royal inscriptions of the Persian period were in the late Babylonian language style.
Assyrian was the other branch of the Akkadian, but some early samples of the dialect have come from Anatolia. The language of the government during the empire was heavily influenced by Babylonia, though there are tablets in the current Assyrian dialects. The Assyrian language faded out with the empire’s destruction in 612 B.C.
Akkadian is one of the major parents of the Hebrew tongue, and many obscure words and phrases in Genesis have been clarified by comparing Hebrew and Akkadian. Some features of Hebrew grammar and vocabulary have been made more intelligible by tracing them back to Akkadian. The contributions of this language to a better understanding of the Old Testament, however, have not been exhausted.
The Hurrian Language
The Hurrian language was first discovered on some of the Tell el-Amarna letters and in inscriptions found in Boghazkoy. The Nuzi tablets of the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries have provided most of the information about Hurrian that is available. The many Hurrian personal names known from the ancient Near East have also contributed information for the grammatical analysis of the language.
The Hurrian language was unrelated to Sumerian, Akkadian, or any Indo-European tongues. It seems to have some affinity with ancient Armenian.
The greatest contribution that Hurrian made to the Hebrew tongue was its tendency to soften the sound of the consonants b, g, d, k, p, and t after vowels. This trait is peculiar to Hebrew among Semitic languages.
The Nile Valley
The Egyptian Language
The origin of the Egyptian language is unknown. It is usually classed as Hamitic (African) in type, but it also has several affinities to the Semitic language. At least by 3000 B.C., it was a language in its own right, and came to its classical form, called Middle Egyptian, during the Old Kingdom of the third millennium B.C. Some words of the primitive tongue did survive in religious and medicinal texts. Middle Egyptian became standard in the literature of Egypt into the Roman period, though it was obsolete
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before the Eighteenth Dynasty and was a dead language by the fourteenth century.
Middle Egyptian had many words for all aspects of everyday life, but very few abstract words for emotions or ideas as such. Later, abstract words did come into the language. The older literature indicates that speech was in short, independent sentences; but the exact pronunciation of Egyptian words is difficult to ascertain because the script did not have signs for separate vowels. Consequently, the spelling (transliterations) of Egyptian names varies among scholars.
The Egyptian language moved through several stages of development. This development, as in almost all known languages, was in the direction of simplification, such as dropping the final “t” or loss of specialized endings. Because written language tends to be conservative, many of these lost elements continued to be written long after they had ceased being spoken (cf. French rendezvous, hors d’oeuvres). Such a situation prevailed in Egypt until the time of Iknaton, when it was decreed that the language should be written as it was spoken. This stage is called late Egyptian. It is often written in simplified, cursive hieroglyphics. A later stage of the language, demotic, shows even more simplification, with a still more simplified script.
The final stage of Egyptian is called Coptic. Under the influence of the Hellenistic rulers, the Ptolemies, the Egyptians adapted their language to a Greek-style alphabet. Coptic, then, is Egyptian in Greek letters. Later, when Egypt became largely Christian, many copies of the Scriptures were done in Coptic. These manuscripts are of great value for textual criticism of the Bible, especially the New Testament.
The Levant
The Aramaic and Canaanite languages are often classed as a northwestern branch of the Semitic family. They are fairly closely related, but they developed somewhat differently. Their influence extended in opposite directions: Aramaic to the east and Canaanite to the west.
The Aramaic Language
In the Pentateuch there occurs one short phrase in Aramaic. Uttered by Laban (Gen. 31:47), it is the name he gave to the heap of stones that was the memorial to the covenant made between him and Jacob. There are traces of Aramaic in some Egyptian inscriptions of the New Kingdom. Otherwise, little is known about the language before its first inscriptions appeared about 1000 B.C.
On the basis of inscriptions covering about a thousand years, scholars have set up these periods of its history: Old Aramaic, on North Syrian
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inscriptions (tenth to the eighth century); Official Aramaic on Assyrian tablets (eighth to the end of the seventh century); Neo-Babylonian on Babylonian tablets (605-539 B.C.); Persian Aramaic (539-333 B.C.); Levantine Aramaic after 721 B.C. in Syria and Palestine; and Palestinian Jewish Aramaic in later intertestamental and New Testament times.
During the Assyrian Empire, Aramaic replaced Akkadian as the lingua franca of international displomacy and continued to enjoy this status during the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods. It became more and more the language of the common people of the Mesopotamian valley, so that when the Hebrews were taken to that area in exile they gradually adopted the language as their own. In Palestine, Aramaic became increasingly the common tongue and continued such status through New Testament times. A few Eastern Orthodox churches still retain the Aramaic and its cousin, Syriac, as their liturgical languages. Aramaic also continued in Jewish circles for a number of centuries.
Sections of two books in the Old Testament are written in Aramaic. They are Ezra 4:8–6:18; 7:12–26; and Daniel 2:4b–7:28. A short sentence is found in Jeremiah 10:11. There has been sharp controversy whether Aramaisms are present in other passages of the Old Testament.
The Canaanite Language
A member of the northwest branch of Semitic tongues, the Canaanite language (called “Phoenician” by the Greeks) appears only sporadically in Egyptian inscriptions. The latter had commercial contacts with Byblos, the port city of the Canaanites. Any early native literature has disappeared because papyrus and leather were more popular as writing materials than stone or clay.
The Tell el-Amarna letters of the fourteenth century have Canaanite names and phrases mixed in the normal Akkadian of the tablets. A few very short inscriptions on stone, metal, and broken pottery give some hints about the language; but since only consonants were used in the script, pronunciation is mainly guesswork.
The big breakthrough came with the discovery of ancient Ugarit (Ras Shamrah) at the northeastern tip of the Mediterranean Sea in 1929. A large number of inscriptions in several different scripts are in Canaanite, dating from before 1200 B.C. Since vowels are employed in many of these inscriptions, and some of the materials are lengthy, rapid advances have been made in understanding the language better. Roman sources indicate that a great library of Canaanite (Phoenician, Punic) literature was in existence at Carthage in A.D. 146, but it was destroyed by the Romans.
Though the limited Canaanite literature curtails research into the language, the Ugaritic materials have revealed that many words and phrases in the poetry of the Old Testament, especially the Psalms and the
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Wisdom Literature, are basically Canaanite. Parallel phrases and similarities of poetic structure have helped to establish the antiquity of the Song of Miriam (Exod. 15), the Balaam Oracles (Exod. 22–24), the Blessing of Jacob (Gen. 49), and the Song of Moses (Deut. 33).
The Hebrew Language
Except for the few portions of Aramaic mentioned above, the Old Testament has come to us written in the Hebrew language, hence it is the tongue in which a student of that portion of the Bible is interested. The language of the Israelites, however, is never called Hebrew in the Old Testament. It is called “the Jew’s language” in II Kings 18:26, 28 and in Nehemiah 13:24, and “the language of Canaan” in Isaiah 19:18.
The Hebrew language is a highly mixed tongue, the child of several parents. It is the result of a fusion of Akkadian, Canaanite, and Aramaic. Some think ancient Arabic was also involved. It is possible that Abraham first spoke a dialect of Akkadian, then Canaanite. Jacob probably learned Aramaic while with Laban. The Hebrew language may have taken its distinctive form while the Israelites were in the land of Goshen. The Bible does not tell the story of its development, but the earliest inscription in Hebrew, the Gezer Calendar from Solomon’s time, was written in good Hebrew.
Hebrew was the living language of the Israelites until the Exile. Then they gradually limited it to their religious activities and employed Aramaic for everyday speech. The nonbiblical literature of the Qumran sect and the Bar Kochbah letters show that Hebrew had not altogether become a dead language in New Testament times, but it did become obsolete after the Second Revolt ended in A.D. 135. Through the centuries it has been the language of piety for the Jewish people, until it was revived and became a living language again in modern Israel.
Hebrew is a typical Semitic language. Words are formed from a basic set of three consonants called a “root,” which carry the fundamental meaning of those words. Highly variable vowels tend to modify the root meaning as need requires. It is even possible that the same set of three consonants can represent different meanings. One set carries eight meanings, but this is rare.
The Hebrew manner of thinking was not like ours in the western world, and this is reflected in its structure. We, taught by the Greeks, tend to think with logical syllogisms; but the Hebrews thought optically, that is, with many similes and metaphors. The ancient language had a few particles, adjectives, and adverbs. Like English, it lost most of its case endings. Many sentences are short and blunt.
The Hebrew verb system differs from that found in Indo-European
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Language Families of the Ancient Near East
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systems. Hebrew verbs are not based on tense and mood. The time element must be gained mostly from context. Instead, the Hebrew verb stresses completed action, incomplete action, continuous action, intensive action, or caused action. Its conjugation differs from that in English, for example. There is a strong emotional element in the average Hebrew verb and in many nouns. This emotional tone is often completely lost in translation into English.
Hebrew words do not always coincide in meaning with words in other languages; sometimes the Hebrew meaning is broader, sometimes more limited, in scope. This makes a proper choice of words for translation purposes a difficult task. Hebrew has some important words that have no exact English equivalent. It lacks some words that we take for granted: for example, “religion,” “person,” “brain.” Idioms are the most difficult to translate, and Hebrew has its share of them. Probably it has some we do not yet even recognize as idioms. Weights and measures are not the same as in English, and hence are not usually translated. They are transliterated and then explained in a footnote (e.g., shekel, omer, ephah). Names that are loaded with meaning in Hebrew lose their significance when transliterated into English. Usually they are so hard to pronounce that they are skipped over by English readers.
Hebrew is a vital, dynamic language. It can be learned fairly quickly; it just requires hard work. Actually, three Hebrew words are so well known among Christians that they are universal. They are “sabbath,” “amen,” and “hallelujah.”
(From The Pentateuch in its Cultural Environment by G. Herbert Livingston. Copyright 1974 by Baker Book House and used by permission.)
FIVE YEAR INDEX
An index for the first five volumes of Bible and Spade (1972–1976) is now available. It contains a subject index, scripture index and a list of articles. The cost is $2.00 plus .50 for postage and handling. Order from Word of Truth, Box 288, Ballston Spa. NY 12020.
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