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CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK
EXODUS
DR. DAVID ADAMS
#14
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>> Okay. I'm going to ask a question that may show my
ignorance. But I've often wondered: Did Abraham and Moses
speak Hebrew? If so, is it the same Hebrew spoken today?
>> Well, that's not a question that illustrates ignorance at
all. It's actually a very intelligent question. In a sense,
yes, they did speak Hebrew. And in another sense, no, they
didn't. What they spoke was a language that would have been I
guess we might describe the ancestor of the Hebrew of the Bible
and of modern Hebrew.
Now, modern Hebrew has changed a bit even from the Hebrew
of the Bible. So the language that Abraham would have spoken
would have been an earlier ancestor. And the language Moses
would have spoken would have been fairly close to the Hebrew
that's recorded in the Hebrew Old Testament. Although, it would
have been written with a different script, with a different type
face.
To understand the languages of the Bible, we probably
should talk just a little bit about the languages of the ancient
world in general. From the Old Testament perspective we tend to
group the languages of the ancient world into two big groups:
Those that we call Semitic and those that we call non-Semitic.
Obviously what the non-Semitic languages have in common
is that they are not Semitic. So the reason for that are the
ones that we really care about, the ones we're most interested
in from an Old Testament perspective are the Semitic languages.
Keeping in mind, of course, that ultimately all languages are
mixed.
There are elements, you know, that occur in common
languages even though those languages are not necessarily
directly related. We tend to describe languages as falling into
families, which means that they share a common set of
characteristics with one another. So maybe the thing for us to
spend just a moment on is to talk about Semitic languages in
terms of the common things that they have that make them a
member of the same language family.
Well, one of the things that characterizes Semitic
languages are the way that words are formed. Now, this doesn't
seem so natural to us because our words in English are not
formed on any particular pattern the way that they are in
Hebrew. So this is a foreign kind of concept for us. But it's
one that's very characteristic of Semitic languages.
In Semitic languages, the vast majority of words are
based on three consonants. That is to say they are combinations
of three consonants. And the vowels may change. But the three
consonants remain the same all the time. And we call these
groups of three consonants that words are related around, we
call those roots in Hebrew. Maybe the easiest way to see this
is to give you an example that comes from both Hebrew and from
other languages. And you can see how these words are related.
Let's take a common Hebrew word. The word for king. The
Hebrew word for king -- and I'll transliterate it into English
for you -- is melek. We might spell that in English m-e-l-e-k.
Melek. Melek, the word for king, is based on these three
consonants, MLK. And these consonants are always used for words
that have to do with ruling and nouns like kings that embody or
incapsulate rulers. So the noun for king in Hebrew is melek, as
we've said. The verb, to be king or to rule, is malak. We
would maybe transliterate that m-a-l-a-k. Malak. So melek is a
king. Malak is to rule.
Let's look at some other languages outside of Hebrew.
For example, Akkadian or old Babylonian or old Assyrian has the
same word or same root in it. So the word for a prince or a
ruler in Akkadian is m-a-l-k-u, malku. In this case the U on
the end is a nominative case ending. One of the distinctive
features of Hebrew, at least by biblical Hebrew times, is that
it has lost its case endings. And here is one place where
Abraham's language may have differed from that of the Old
Testament.
We don't know exactly when the case endings were lost in
Hebrew. So it may have been the case that around Abraham's time
they still had case endings in Hebrew. And so the Hebrew word
melek may have had a U on the end in Abraham's time.
Just as in English we used to have case endings. But
those case endings have fallen away. And they hardly ever show
up anymore. We have a remnant of case endings in something like
putting apostrophe S on the end of the word to make it
possessive. So we say the dog's house. That's a remnant of a
case ending type idea. And biblical Hebrew has lost its case
endings. But they occur in some other Semitic languages.
Another language that's closely related to Hebrew because
it's a Canaanite dialect is the language of Ugarit. Ugarit is a
city up the coast from Israel a couple of hundred miles. And in
Ugarit they have the same three-letter grouping for this idea,
MLK. The problem in Ugarit is they didn't spell things with
vowels. And so we don't know exactly how the word was
pronounced. But the noun that's simply written MLK means king.
And the noun written with a T on the end, MLKT, is the feminine
version of the noun meaning queen in Ugaritic. And in Aramaic
there we get a word like Akkadian, malku, meaning a kingdom or a
reign. We have a similar word in Hebrew, malkuth,
m-a-l-k-u-t-h. In Hebrew, malkuth, meaning a kingdom or a
reign.
So you can see all of the Semitic languages share this
common idea of building nouns and verbs most of the time around
words that we call roots that are based on three letters. So
that's a common characteristic of Semitic languages.
Another common characteristic that's related to this is
that the vocabulary of these languages is very, very similar.
Since they are -- they are all building their words based on the
same three-letter roots, the vocabulary words are always very
close to one another. That's why in Hebrew, Akkadian, Ugaritic
and Aramaic, if you learn the vocabulary for one of those,
you've learned a big chunk of the vocabulary for others because
they share the same body of words with slight variations in the
way that they are formed.
But another major difference between our languages and
Semitic languages is the way that the verbs are formed. In our
languages we usually form verbs based on the idea of time. We
call them tenses. We talk about our verbs have a past tense.
They talk about things that happened in the past. Or a future
tense, talking about things that happen in the future.
But Semitic languages do not have tense in the same way
that modern English has tenses. They didn't talk about past
events and future events in exactly the same way that we do.
Now, there's a lot of debate with scholars about the exact
nature of these forms of the Hebrew verb. And I won't bore you
with those details. But I will bore you with these details:
That verbs in Hebrew and other Semitic languages primarily deal
not so much with time but with the state of an action. In other
words, an action is either completed or incompleted or its in
process. And so these verbs are more concerned not with time
but with whether an action is ongoing or whether it's done or
whether it is yet to be started.
And so the Hebrew verbal system and Semitic language
verbal systems in general are different. And that's one of the
things that makes translating from these languages into modern
languages a little bit of a challenge and a little bit
interesting. Because they don't -- because the things that we
call tenses don't always line up with the verbal forms in these
languages consistently. And so you have to -- you know, you
have to juggle them a bit. So the formation of words is in
terms of verbal roots, the formation of vocabulary, you know, in
the way that they share a common vocabulary and the structure of
the verbal system, these are all ways in which Semitic languages
differ from the languages that you and I speak today.
Now, we also need to make one more distinction. That is
between the language and the way that the language is written.
That is to say the script or as we might say today -- in
computerdom we might say the font that they used. And over
history the scripts or the typefaces or the fonts that they used
changed and developed, even though the underlying language
stayed much the same.
So Abraham would have been speaking an earlier form of
the Semitic language that we call Hebrew. Which is really the
same as Canaanite, to be honest. It's just a subdialect of
Canaanite. Moses would have spoken a very similar language,
which he no doubt would have learned and spoken and wrote the
Old Testament in. David and Solomon and others later would have
been speaking essentially the same language with some changes
over time just as there have been changes in English over time.
But it's recognizably the same language. So that once
you learn Hebrew, if you look at inscriptions from a very early
date, you have to learn the different typeface. But the
language is very much the same.
So yes, Abraham and Moses did speak Hebrew or at least an
earlier form of Hebrew. And that gives us a great deal of
confidence in the written word of God that they gave us as it
has been preserved and transmitted to us faithfully by scribes
and scholars from prophets down to the present day.
***
This text is being provided in a rough draft format.
Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in
order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a
totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
***