HEBREW LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. The name Hebrew (Latin, Hebroeus ; Greek, c∕3pαcoς) is a transcription of 'ebrâyâ, the Aramaic equivalent of the original Old Testament word '*PJζ 'ibrι, pl. 'tδr⅛ι, which is the proper Gentile name of the people who also bore the collective name of Israel or Children of Israel (B’nâ Israel). The name of Israel with its sacred associations in the patriarchal history is that by which the Old Testament writers prefer to designate their nation; and this circumstance, combined with the fact that the Sacred Text frequently employs the term Hebrews where foreigners are introduced as speaking or spoken to (f.g., Exod. ii. 6; 1 Sam. iv. 6, 9; Gen. xl. 15; Ex. iii. 18), has led to the conjecture that the name of Hebrews (men from the other side, scil. of the Euphrates) was originally given to the descendants of Abraham by their Canaanite neighbours, and continued to be the usual designation of the Israelites among foreigners, just as the Magyars are known to other Europeans as Hungarians (foreigners), as we call the High-Dutch Germans (warriors), or as the Greeks gave the name of Phoenicians to the people that called themselves Canaanites. A closer view of the case does not confirm this conjecture. The name of Israel is often found in the Old Testament in the mouth of foreigners, and the whole usus loquendi is explained by the observation that the Gentile noun corresponding to the collective “Israel” is regularly “Hebrew” and not “Israelite,” the latter word being rare and apparently of late formation. Nor has the word Hebrew been hitherto found in the early monuments of other Eastern nations; for the identification proposed by Chabas which finds the Hebrews in the hieroglyphic Apuriu is more than doubtful. On the other hand the name of Israel appears on the stone of Mesha king of Moab, and perhaps has been deciphered on Assyrian monuments.
The form 'ibrι is, in the language of Semitic grammarians, a relative noun, presupposing the word 'Eber as the name of the tribe, place, or common ancestor, from whom the Hebrews are designated. Accordingly we find Eber as a nation side by side with Assyria in the obscure poetical passage Num. xxiv. 24, and Eber as ancestor of the Hebrews in the genealogical lists of Gen. x., xi. Here we must apparently distinguish two records. According to Gen. xi. (and Gen. x. 24) Eber is the great-grandson of Shein through Arphaxad, and ancestor of Terah through Peleg, Reu, Serug, and Nahor. These are not to be taken a3 the names of individual men. Several of them are designations of places or districts near the upper waters of the Euphrates and Tigris, and among other circumstances the place at the head of the series assigned to the district of Arrapachitis (Arphaxad), through which a migration from Ararat to the lands occupied by the Semites in historical times would first pass, suggests the probability that the genealogy is not even meant to exhibit a table of ethnological affinities, but rather presents a geographical sketch of the early movements of the Hebrews, who are personified under the name of Eber. If this is so we can hardly venture to assert (with some scholars) that the author of the list (the Levitical Elohist) extended the name of Hebrews to all descendants of Terah. The case is different with another and apparently older record of which a fragment seems to be preserved in Gen. x. 21, 25-30. Here there is no intermediate link between Shem and Eber. Sons of Shem and sons of Eber appear to be coextensive ideas, and to the latter are reckoned not only the descendants of Peleg (Aramaeans, Israelites, Ishmaelite Arabs, <fcc.), but the South Arabian tribes of Joktan. We possess no information which casts light on this wide conception of the sons of Eber, and in the ordinary language of the Old Testament Hebrew and Israelite are strictly synonymous.
Compare, however, the interesting conjectures of Sprenger, Alte Geographie Arabiens (Bera, 1875), p. 294, who identifies Peleg with Falag in Central Arabia, and finds in the record a witness to the truth of the view that Arabia is the original centre of the Semitic dispersion, a view which is shared by other scholars, as Hitzig {Geschichte Israels, pp. 26, S9), and Schrader (Z. D. Μ. G., 1873, pp. 397-424). In this connexion it is perhaps worth while to note the Arabic Gentile name Obri, belonging to Obra, a minor division of the Joktanic tribe of the Azd {Lubb-il-l·ubdb, ed. Veth, p. 175).
When it is recognized that Eber in Genesis is not an actual personage but an ethnological or geographical abstraction, we are thrown back on etymological conjecture as to the origin of the name of Hebrews. 'Eber means the further bauk of a river, from a root meaning to cross. Hence in Gen. xiv. 13 the Septuagint renders Abram the Hebrew by ό τrepciπ∕ς, “the crosser.” Grammatically more accurate, while resting on the same etymology, is the rendering of Aquila, o πeρaιτη<s, “the man from the other side” of the Euphrates, which is the explanation of Jewish tradition {Brβshit Rabba, and Rashi) and still generally adopted. It is, however, far from satisfactory, and almost of necessity depends on the theory that the name was fixed upon the Hebrew immigrants by the earlier inhabitants of Canaan. A modified form of the etymology takes 'eber in the Arabic sense of a riverbank, and makes the Hebrews “dwellers in a land of rivers” (Steiner in the Bibel-Lex., ii. 613). This goes well with Peleg (watercourse), as in Arabia we have the district Falag, so named because it is furrowed by waters (Sprenger, Ceog. Arab., p. 234). The name “Hebrew Languages— By the Hebrew language we understand the ancient tongue of the Hebrews in Canaan —the language in which the Old Testament is composed, with the exception of the Aramaic passages (Jer. x. 11; Ezra iv. 8-vi. 18; vii. 12-26; Dan. ii. 4-vii. 28). But we do not find that this language was called Hebrew by those who spoke it. It is the lip, i.e., speech of Canaan, Isa. xix. 18, or, as spoken in Southern Palestine, ΓP∏*)∏* Jewish (2 Kings xviii. 26; Neh. xiii. 24). The later Jews call it the holy tongue in contrast to the profane Aramaic dialect (commonly though improperly enough called Syro-Chaldaic) which long before the time of Christ had superseded the old language as the vernacular of the Jews. This change had already taken place at the time when the expression “in Hebrew” (Ιβράίστί.) first occurs (Prologue to Sirach); and both in the Apocrypha and in the New Testament the ambiguous term, naming the language after those who used it, often denotes the contemporary vernacular, not the obsolete idiom of the Old Testament. But the other sense was admissible (e.g., Rev. ix. 11, and so frequently in Josephus), and naturally became the prevalent one among Christian writers who had little occasion to speak of anything but the Old Testament Hebrew. In modern usage it is incorrect to call the Jewish Aramaic Hebrew; though uneducated Jews apply the name even to the corrupt German and Spanish jargons which they are accustomed to write and print in Hebrew characters.
Character and Philological Relations of Hebrew.— Hebrew is a language of the group which since Eichhorn has generally been known as Semitic, and of which Arabic and Ethiopie (Southern Semitic), the various dialects of Aramaic, and the language of the Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions are the other chief representatives. From its geographical position as the language of Palestine between the Aramaeans of the north and the Arabs of the south, Hebrew has been called AIiddle Semitic. Or Aramaic Assyrian and Hebrew may be grouped together as Northern Semitic in contrast to Arabic and Ethiopie. The affinities of the Semitic languages are so close that they may fairly be compared with a sub-group of the Indo-Germanic family—for example, with the Teutonic languages. The fundamental unity of the Semitic vocabulary is easily observed from the absence of compounds (except in proper names) and from the fact that almost all words are derived from their roots in definite patterns (measures') as regular as those of grammatical inflexion. The roots regularly consist of three consonants (seldom four or five), the accompanying vowels having no radical value, but shifting according to grammatical rules to express various embodiments of the root idea. The triliteral roots are substantially common to the whole Semitic group, subject to certain consonantal permutations, of which the most important are strikingly analogous to those laid down by Grimm for the Teutonic languages.
There are four sounds in Arabic unknown to Hebrew and Aramaic, and for which the former regularly has a sibilant, the latter a lingual—in one case a deep guttural. This guttural (JJ), and the palatal letters which in the following table are represented by d, s, t, z, are peculiar Semitic sounds. [table]
On the last equation see Lagarde, Semiticα, i. 22; Noldeke in Z. D. Μ. G., xxxii., 405; and on the permutation of consonants in general, Merx, Gram. Syr., § 24; Stade in Mοrgeηl. Forschungen (1875), p. 179 se<p Whether the Arabic or Aramaic forms are the older is disputed. No one maintains that the Hebrew forms are original.
Derivation from the roots and inflexion proceed partly by the reduplication of root letters and the addition of certain preformatives and afformatives (more rarely by the insertion of formative consonants in the body of the root), partly by modifications of the vowels with which the radicals are pronounced. Almost every root expresses in its origin something that can be grasped by the senses, and the mechanism by which words are formed from the root is adapted to present sensible notions in a variety of nuances and in all possible embodiments and connexions, so that there are regular forms to express in a single word the intensity, the repetition, the production of the root idea—the place, the instrument, the time of its occurrence, and so forth. Thus the expression of intellectual ideas is necessarily metaphorical, almost every word being capable of a material sense or at least conveying the distinct suggestion of some sensible notion. For example, the names of passione depict their physiological expression; “to confer honour” means also “to make heavy,” and so on. The same concrete character, the same inadequacy to convey purely abstract thoughts without a substratum appealing to the senses, appears in the grammatical structure of the Semitic tongues,—for example, in the absence of the neuter gender, in the extreme paucity of particles, in the scanty provision for the subordination of propositions, which deprives the Semitic style of all involved periods and reduces it to a succession of short sentences linked by the simple copula and. The fundamental element of these languages is the noun, and in the fundamental type of sentence the predicate is a noun set down without any copula and therefore without distinction of past, present, or future time. The finite verb is developed from nominal forms (participial or infinitive), and is equally without distinction of time. Instead of tenses we find two forms, the perfect and the imperfect, which are used according as the speaker contemplates the verbal action as a thing complete or as conditional, imperfect, or in process. It lies in the nature of this distinction that the imperfect alone has moods. In their later stages the languages seek to supply the lack of tenses by circumlocutions with a substantive verb and participles. Other notable features common to the Semitic tongues are the use of appended suffixes to denote the possessive pronouns with a substantive, or the accusative of a personal pronoun with a verb, and the expression of the genitive relation by what is called construction or annexation, the governing noun being placed immediately before the genitive, and if possible slightly shortened in pronunciation so that the two words may run together as one idea. A characteristic of the later stages of the languages is the resolution of this relation into a prepositional clause.
Theβe and other peculiarities are sufficient to establish the original unity of the group, and entitle us to postulate an original language from which all the Semitic dialects have sprung. Of the relation of this language to other linguistic stems, especially to the Indo-Germanic on the east and the North-African languages on the west, we cannot yet speak with certainty; but it appears that the present system of triliteral roots has grown out of an earlier biliteral system which, so far as it can be reconstructed, must form the basis of scientific inquiry into the ultimate affinities of the Semitic group.
Before the rise of comparative philology it was a familiar opinion that Hebrew is the original speech of mankind. Taken from the Jews, and as already expressed in the Palestinian Targum on Gen. xi. 1, this opinion drew its main support from etymologies and other data in the earlier chapters of Genesis, which, however, were as plausibly turned by Syriac writers in favour of their own tongue. Till quite recently many excellent scholars (including Ewald) have claimed for Hebrew the greatest relative antiquity among Semitic tongues. But though Hebrew has by far the oldest literature, this does not prove that its structure comes nearest to the original Semitic language. And it is now generally recognized that in grammatical structure the Arabic, shut up within its native deserts till the epoch of Islam, preserved much more of the original Semitic forms than either Hebrew or Aramaic. In its richer vocalization, in the possession of distinct case-endings, in the use for feminine nouns of the affbrmative t, which in the northern dialect has passed through h (originally audible as in Egyptian Arabic) into a mere vowel, in the more extensive range of passive and modal forms, and in other refinements of inflexion, Arabic represents no later development, but the original wealth and primitive subtlety of Semitic speech, as appears not only from fragmentary survivals in the other dialects but from an examination of the process of decay which has brought the spoken Arabic of the present day into a grammatical condition closely parallel to the Old Testament Hebrew. But while Arabic is in many respects the elder brother, it is not the parent of Hebrew or Aramaic. Each member of the group had an independent development from a stage prior to any existing language, though it would seem that Hebrew did not branch off’ from Aramaic so soon as from Arabic, while in its later stages it came under direct Aramaic influence.
Among the points in which Hebrew differs both from Arabic and Aramaic may be mentioned the consonantal relations already spoken of, the system of tone long vowels, the use of Waw consecutive, the ∏ of the causative and reflexive stems and of the article, and the compensation for omitting the reduplication of gutturals and r by lengthening a preceding vowel. Again, Hebrew agrees with Arabic against Aramaic in possessing a prefixed article, in the use of the Nifal (Arab. vπ. ), and in other minor points. But in more notable features Hebrew and Aramaic agree against Arabic, as in the absence of broken plurals, the place of the accent, the aspiration of certain letters whenever they are preceded by a vowel sound, and the substitution of y for w as the first radical of roots. To give further details would carry us too far into comparative grammar. Speaking generally, it may be said that Hebreλv is less copious in vocabulary than Arabic (in which tongue, however, the abundance of synonyms is largely due to an artificial combination of several dialects), and less rich in subtle distinctions of grammatical form and refinements of syntax. On the other hand, Hebrew is much superior to Aramaic in flexibility of structure, in fulness of vowels, and in all the qualities which adapt a language for poetical expression.
Geographical Sphere and History of Hebrew as a Spoken Language.— The Hebrew spoken by the Israelites in Canaan was separated only by very minor differences (like those of our provincial dialects) from the speech of neighbouring tribes. We know this for the Moabite language from the stone of Mesha; and the indications furnished by proper names, as well as the acknowledged affinity of Israel with these tribes, make the same thing probable for Ammon and Edom. More remarkable is the fact that the Phoenicians and Canaanites, with whom the Israelites acknowledged no brotherhood, spoke a language which, at least as written, differs but little from Biblical Hebrew. This observation has been used in support of the very old idea that the Hebrews originally spoke Aramaic, and changed their language in Canaan. But an exacter study of the Phoenician inscriptions shows differences from Hebrew which suffice to constitute a distinct dialect, and combine with other indications to favour the view that the descendants of Abraham brought their Hebrew idiom with them from Haran. And in this connexion it is important to observe that the old Assyrian, which preceded Aramaic in regions with which the book of Genesis connects the origins of Abraham, is in many respects closely akin to Hebrew. As the origin of Hebrew is lost in the obscurity that hangs over the early movements of the Semitic tribes, so we know very little of the changes which the language underwent in Canaan. The existence of local differences of speech is proved by Judges xii. 6; but the attempt to make out in the Old Testament records a northern and a Judaean dialect, or even besides' these a third dialect for the Simeonites of the extreme south, has led to no certain results. In general it may be said that the Biblical text supplies inadequate data for studying the history of the language. Semitic writing, especially a purely consonantal text such as the Old Testament originally was, gives an imperfect picture of the very grammatical and phonetic details most likely to vary dialectically or in course of time. The later punctuation (including the notation of vowels), and even many things in the present consonantal text, represent the formal pronunciation of the Synagogue as it took shape after Hebrew became a dead language—for even the Septuagint has often a more primitive pronunciation of proper names. This modern system being applied to all parts of the Old Testament alike, many archaisms were obliterated or disguised, and the earlier and later writings present in the received text a grammatical uniformity which is certainly not original. It is true that occasional consonantal forms inconsistent with the accompanying vowels have survived—especially in the books least read by the Jews—and appear in the light of comparative grammar as indications of more primitive forms. These sporadic survivals show that the correction of obsolete forms was not carried through with perfect consistency; but we are never safe to argue as if we possessed the original form of the texts.
In the Pentateuch, for example, the form Kl∏ stands not only for ΝΙΠ (3d personal prom masc.) but for K'Π (the feminine). And hence a favourite argument was drawn for the superior antiquity of this part of the Old Testament. But the same thing is found elsewhere (Frensdorff, Mass. JVörterb., p. 233), especially in Babylonian codices of the prophets (Geiger, Urschrift, p. 236; Z. D. Μ. G., xxviii. 676). The feminine can never by any possibility have been pronounced hu, but the old orthography was probably J<∏ for hu and hi alike (Nöldeke in Bibel-Lexikon, id supra, after Levy).
The chief historical changes in the Hebrew language which we can still trace are due to Aramaic influence. The Northern Israelites were in immediate contact with Aramaean populations and some Aramaic loan-words were used, at least in Northern Israel, from a very early date. At the time of Hezekiah Aramaic seems to have been the usual language of diplomacy spoken by the statesmen of Judah and Assyria alike (2 Kings xviii. 26). After the fall of Samaria the Hebrew population of Northern Israel was partly deported, their place being taken by new colonists most of whom probably had Aramaic as their mothertongue. It is not therefore surprising that even in the language of Judea increasing signs of Aramaic influence appear before the Exile. The fall of the Jewish kingdom accelerated the decay of Hebrew as a spoken language. Not indeed that the captives forgot their own tongue in Babylon, as older scholars supposed on the basis of Jewish tradition. The Exilic and post-Exile prophets do not write in a lifeless tongue, and Hebrew was still the language of Jerusalem in the time of Nehemiah (ch. xiii.) in the middle of the 5th century b.c. But after the Exile the petty people of the Jews were in daily intercourse with a surrounding Aramaean population, aud the Aramaic tongue, which was the official language of the western provinces of the Persian empire, began to take rank as the recognized medium of polite intercourse and letters even among tribes of Arabic blood— the Nabataeans whose inscriptions in the Hauran are written in Aramaic. Thus Hebrew as a spoken language gradually yielded to its more powerful neighbour, and the style of the latest Old Testament writers is not only full of Aramaic words and forms but largely coloured with Aramaic idioms, while their Hebrewhas lost the force and freedom of a living tongue (Ecclesiastes, Esther, some Psalms, Daniel). The Chronicler no longer thoroughly understood the Old Hebrew sources from which he worked, while lor the latest part of his history he used a Jewish Aramaic document, part of which he incorporated in the book of Ezra. Long before the time of Christ Hebrew was the exclusive property of scholars, and its further history is that of a merely literary language.
The Literary Development of Hebrew. — The Semilid peoples possessed the art of writing and an alphabetical character from a date so remote as to be lost in the mists of antiquity. This character was formerly known as Phoenician, its invention being ascribed to that people (Tac., Ann., xi. 14). In reality it was the common property of all Semitic nations between Assyria and Egypt—an alphabetic character in contact on the east and on the west with more complicated syllabic or hieroglyphic systems, from one or other of which it may possibly have been derived.
De Rouge's theory that the alphabet was derived by the Phoenicians from the Egyptian hieratic writing obtained much currency a few years ago (see Alphabet), but has rather lost ground since the appearance in 1874 of the long expected Mémoire sur l'origine Egyptienne de l'alphabet Phénicien. See the criticism in Lagarde’s Symmicta, p. 113 scq. A newer theory by Deecke (Z. D. Μ. G. 1 xxxi. 102 seq.) derives the alphabet from the cuneiform characters, and makes the Aramaeans its authors, for which there is ancient tradition in Pliny, Diodorus, and Clemens Alexandrinus. Deecke dates the invention from the 9th century b. c.,when the Assyrians first established themselves in Aram. This is certainly wrong, for, apart from other arguments, the stone of Mesha is not a product of the first days of alphabetic writing. Against the derivation of the Semitic alphabet from any hieroglyphic system, see Levy, Phönizische Studien, i. 49 seq. The best comparative table of Semitic alphabets is that by Euting in the English translation of Bickell’s Outlines of Ηcb. Gram. (Leipsic, 1877). On the history of Hebrew writing, especially in its bearing on the history of the Biblical text, see Wellhausen in Bleek’s Einleitung, 4th ed. (1878), with Noldeke’s remarks, Z. D. Μ. G., xxxii. 591 seq.
This ancient alphabet consists of twenty-two consonants, of which one at least (y) stood in Hebrew for two distinct sounds, still separated in the Septuagint pronunciation. The vowels w ere supplied by the reader—which is not so difficult in Semitic languages, where vocalization constitutes no difference of root. In certain cases the weaker consonants served as matres lectionis to indicate cognate vowel sounds and preclude ambiguity of pronunciation; but in the old writing tl1i3 usage was far less extensive than in our Hebrew MSS., and hardly applied except to diphthongs and to a,—or less often î, û—at the end of words. This old character with its scanty indications of vowels continued to be used by the Hebrews throughout the flourishing period of their literature and for some time after the Exile, till at length they gradually adopted a newer form of letters (the square or, as the Talmud calls it, the Assyrian character) which was developed among the Aramaeans and spread with the increase of Aramaic influence. Jewish tradition ascribes the introduction of the square character to Ezra (Synh. 21b 22a; Jerome, Prol. Gal. ∖ > but the Samaritans, who did not receive the Pentateuch from the Jews till about 400 b.c., must have got it in the old letter which they still retain in a corrupted form. The square letter probably did not prevail till a good deal later, the earliest Jewish inscription in which it appears being of the date 176 b.c. (published by De Vogué, Rev. Arch., 1864), while the coins of Judea retain the old character still later. The transformation was complete before the time of Christ, for Mat. V. 16 alludes to the new form of Yod (jot). By this time too the use of matres lectionis must have become more ample. The later introduction of vowel points and accents belongs to the history of the study of Hebrew as a dead language. The forms of the old Semitic alphabet are most suitable to be cut on stone, and indicate a special adaptation for monumental inscriptions (c∕. the two tables of the Docalogue). Between the beginnings of such inscriptions and the general use of writing for literary purposes a considerable period might intervene. The earliest products of Hebrew authorship seem to have been lyrics and laws, which would circulate in the first instance from mouth to mouth without the use of written copies. We have notice of early written collections of lyrics prior to our present historical books—the Book of the Wars of Jehovah (Num. xκi. 14) and the Book of Jashar (Josh, x., 2 Sam. i). We have no clue to the age of the former book, but the lines quoted from it are plainly of great antiquity. The Book of Jashar is not earlier than the time of Solomon; for a fragment from it referring to the building of the temple has been recovered from the Septuagint of 1 Kings viii. (Wellhausen in Bleek, ut supra, p. 236). The earliest date of written law books is uncertain. It may fairly be made a question whether Moses left in writing any other laws than the commandments on the tables of stone. Even Ex. xxiv. 4 and xxxiv. 27 may in the original context have referred to the ten words alone. And it is certain that ancient law was handed down by oral tradition and local custom to a much later date. The prophets frequently allude to the oral decisions of the priests as a source of law, and the practice of appealing to the local customs of certain towns is alluded to in 2 Sam. xx. 18 (as restored by Ewald from the LXX.)—“Ask at Abel and at Dan whether the genuine old statutes of Israel have lost their force.” In like manner the story of the early fortunes of the nation down to the time of David often presents characteristics which point to oral tradition as its original source. Yet written history began comparatively early. A scribe was attached to the royal court from the reign of David downwards; and the older parts of the books of Samuel, which must have been written not long after the time of that king (see David), are framed in a masterly style, which shows that the art of composition in prose was already thoroughly understood. So too the best written and most brilliant part of the narrative of. the Pentateuch—the combined history of the Jehovist and the non-Levitical Elohist— appears to be unquestionably earlier than the rise of prophetic literature in the 8th century b.c. In this narrative —itself the product of more than one writer—are included several collections of old laws, so that we have between the time of David and the age of Amos and Hosea a flourishing historical and legal literature, in which and in lyrical collections like the Book of Jashar were embodied many poems, legends, and other remains, transmitted, whether orally or by writing, from a much earlier date. To the same period may be assigned the most interesting and graphic histories in the book of Kings, the splendid episode of Elijah, and other remains of Ephraitic history; and to these must probably be added the main stock of the Song of Solomon, though this lyric drama has suffered much from interpolation, and presumably was not written down till a comparatively late date and from imperfect recollection, so that its original shape is very much lost. It is mainly from the admirable prose narratives, to which nothing in later books can be compared, that we must judge of the first bloom of Hebrew literature under the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Ephraim, before the convulsions that accompanied the advance of Assyria and prior to the influence of written prophecy. It is a literature eminently fresh and vivacious, full of exact observation of nature’and of men, always drawing directly from life, and working on the reader not by elaborate description but by dramatic presentation of character and action. The authors are too intent upon the story to interpose their own comments or point a moral, but they tell their tale with sympathy and often with an undercurrent of dry humour. It can hardly be said that the writings of this period have a specifically religious purpose. Reflecting with admirable veracity the actual life of the nation they are full of the relation between Israel and Jehovah, because that relation was constantly present to the people as a very real fact without which the history could not be told. It is to this circumstance that we owe the preservation of so large a mass of early prose, which was taken over and incorporated in their works by later historians who wrote with a distinctly religious purpose; while on the other hand the early lyric collections have disappeared, all but a few fragments, presumably because their tone was prevailingly secular. That the Hebrews once possessed a poetry of high merit drawn from the themes of ordinary life appears, not only from the book of Canticles and such relics as the Song of the Well (Num. xxi. 17, 18), but from the names of popular airs preserved in the titles of the Psalms. Thus we learn from Isa. lxv. 8 that the title Al-Taschith (Ps. lvii.) is taken from a vintage song of which the first line was “Destroy it not, for a blessing is in it.” These popular songs, then, survived the Exile and long continued to live in the mouths of the people. But they were without interest to the later guardians of Israel’s literature, and fell into oblivion when Hebrew ceased to be the vernacular of the nation. A last echo of the festal songs of the Jewish maidens in the Talmud (Mishna Ta , αηit, iv. 8, and the corresponding Gemara) shows only the total decay of the popular muse.
In this earliest period—the age of popular literature, as we may call it, modelled upon the songs and histories that circulated orally through the country—there is a remarkable preponderance of writings connected with the northern kingdom, and these include the narratives that are fullest of human interest and the poetry richest in colour and imagination, such as the loves of Jacob and Rachel, the history of Joseph, the life of Elijah, the pictures of nature in the Canticles. The political and social superiority of Ephraim before the conflict with Assyria is reflected in the literature. A new epoch begins with the rise of written prophecy in the 8th century. By this time writing and literary knowledge were widely diffused (Isa. viii. 1; xxx. 8; X. 19). Amos, himself an excellent stylist, in whose book only perverse ingenuity can trace marks of rusticity (“imperitum sermone,” says Jerome), was a simple herdsman in the wilderness of Judah. Yet it appears that the origin of written prophecy was due less to the spread of education than to the rise of a new school of men whose whole method . and aims were in conflict with the official prophetic societies, the unworthy successors of Samuel and Elijah.
In the terrible struggle with Nineveh, when the kingdom of Ephraim perished and Judea seemed lost beyond hope, the new prophecy, clear of vision when all were blinded, calm in its unshaken faith of ultimate victory, and pursuing with unfaltering steadfastness a great purpose of righteousness, established a spiritual and intellectual ascendency which is stamped on the whole literature of the Assyrian and Chaldaean periods. . In the book of Deuteronomy the ancient ordinances of Israel were rewritten in the prophetic spirit, and the reformation carried out by Josiah on the basis of this book is the decisive proof of the influence of the written word as the organ of prophetic ideas. The same influence can be traced in other directions,—in psalms that express the type of individual faith, and in the historical books as they were finally shaped after the fall of Jerusalem, when the old popular narrative was filled out and continued in a spirit of prophetic pragmatism, and with the direct object of enforcing prophetic teaching. The Exile, which robbed Israel of every other inheritance, gave increased value and authority to the written word, and in the author of Isa. xl.-lxvi. we find a prophet who no longer appears in person before his audience but does his whole work by the pen. There are other short prophecies of the Babylonian age, as Isa. xiii., xiv., which seem to have been first published as anonymous broadsides—a characteristic change from the method of the former prophets, who wrote only what they had first spoken to the people. The earliest written prophecy is nervous rhetoric of the old pregnant Hebrew style interspersed with bursts of song. Even before the Exile this style had undergone a change; the prophecies of Jeremiah have lost something of the old force, while they display a subtler habit of reflexion and a pathos which has its origin in the conflict of a sensitive and shrinking temperament with the overpowering sense of prophetic duty. Jeremiah was much occupied with the dark problems of providence and the meaning of the sufferings of the faithful in Israel, a topic which goes beyond the sphere of the earlier prophecy, but forms a chief theme of Isa. xl.-lxvi., and from a different point of view is taken up and discussed in the book of Job. The last-named book is the highest utterance of another characteristic form of Hebrew literature, the Chokma, that is, wisdom or practical philosophy in parabolic, epigrammatic, and poetic form. The earliest distinct trace of literary cultivation of this philosophy, which from its nature must at first have passed unwritten from mouth to mouth, is the collection of ancient proverbs by scholare in the service of Hezekiah (Prov. xxv. 1). Along with the simple epigrammatic proverbs which continued to be a favourite vehicle of Jewish thought long after Hebrew had given way to Aramaic, the earliest form of Hebrew wisdom seems to have been the fable about plants and trees (Jud. χi., 2 Kings xiv. 9, cf. 1 Kings iv. 33), so different from the animal fables of Kalilag and
Damnag or Sindbân, which the later Semitic literature borrowed from India. The further development of the Chokma ran parallel with the progress of prophecy, and though it is generally maintained that Jeremiah quotes the book of Job, it is perhaps more likely that the contrary is the case, and that the latest and most meditative phase of prophecy was absorbed into the poetry of the Chokma. The brief revival of spoken prophecy after the Exile lacks the old fire, and presents no notable literary feature except the use of somewhat fantastic symbolic imagery, the prototype of the later apocalyptic literature.
The decadence of prophecy and the synchronous systematization of the ceremonial law on lines first drawn by Ezekiel, mark the commencement of the third and last period of Hebrew literature. The age of religious productivity was past, and the narrow limits and political nullity of the new Jewish settlement under the Persians presented no favourable conditions for a fresh development of truly national literature. The scribes took the place of the prophets, and the growth of traditionalism imposed increasing restrictions on original thought. The freshest and best products of this period are the post-Exile psalms, the hymns of the second temple, which occupy a large part of the Psalter, and, though generally inferior to the older lyrics in the highest poetical qualities, are often full of the charm of genuine feeling and sweet utterance, and sometimes rise to a sublime energy of devotion and faith. With these psalms the graceful prose idyll of Ruth has a natural affinity. The other writings of the last age are on the whole much inferior. As the language decayed, the graces of the older prose style were lost. The memoirs of Ezra and Nehemiah, the colourless narrative of the Chronicles, and even the book of Esther, are singularly destitute of literary merit.
Yet letters were sedulously cultivated. The Midrash, or sermonizing treatment of the old history which holds so large a place in later Jewish literature, had come in before the time of the Chronicler, who quotes a work of the kind by name—the Midrash of the Book of Kings (2 Chron. xxiv. 27, cf. xiii. 22). Along with this came the beginnings of Haggada, the formation of parables and tales attached to historical names, of which the book of Jonah is generally taken as an early example, and which attains much greater dimensions in the apocryphal additions to the Hagiographa. And so at the close of the Old Testament period the author of Ecclesiastes could speak of the weariness of much study and the endless sterility of bookmaking. His judgment was confirmed by posterity, for of these many books scarcely a trace remains.
The Cultivation of Hebrew as a Dead Language. · —We have seen that when the latest books of the Old Testament were written Aramaic had already supplanted Hebrew as the language of common life. But the knowledge of the ancient idiom was kept alive not merely by the study of the sacred books but by the continued use of Hebrew for literary purposes. Several books of the Apocrypha appear to be translated from Hebrew originals—Sirach, Judith, 1 Mac.—the last according to the express testimony of Jerome. It is even probable that the Old Testament canon contains elements as late as the epoch of national revival under the Maccabees (Daniel, certain Psalms), for Hebrew was the language of religion as well as of scholarship. As for the scholars, they affected not only to write but to speak in Hebrew; but they could not resist the influence of the Aramaic vernacular, and indeed made no attempt to imitate the classical models of the Old Testament, which neither famished the necessary terminology for the new ideas with which they operated, nor offered in its forms and constructions a suitable vehicle for their favourite processes of legal dialectic. Thus was developed a new scholastic Hebrew, “the language of the wise” (D ’ O2Π pt½), preserving some genuine old Hebrew words which happen not to be in the Bible, and supplying some new necessities of expression by legitimate developments of germs that lay in the classical idiom, but thoroughly interpenetrated with foreign elements and as little fit for higher literary purposes as the Latin of the mediaeval schoolmen. The chief monument of this dialect is the body of traditional law called the Mishna, which is formed of materials of various dates, but was collected in its present form about the close of the 2d Christian century. The doctors of the subsequent period still retained some fluency in the use of Hebrew, but the mass of their teaching preserved in the Gemara is Aramaic. The language of the Mishna has been described by Geiger, Lehr-und Lesebuch zur Sιrrache der Mischnah (Breslau,
1845); L. Dukes, Die Sprache der Hischna (Esslingen,
1846) and Zur rabbinischen Spracldcunde (Vienna, 1851); J. H. Weiss, Mishpat Hshon ham-Mishna (Vienna, 1867).
During the Talmudic period nothing was done for the grammatical study of the old language, but there was a traditional pronunciation for the synagogue, and a traditional interpretation of the sacred text. The earliest monument of Jewish interpretation is the Septuagint, but the fiual form of traditional exegesis is embodied in the Targums or Aramaic paraphrases, especially in the more literal Targums of Oakelos and Jonathan, which are often cited by the Talmudic doctors. Many things in the language of the Old Testament were already obscure, and the meaning of words was discussed in the schools, sometimes by the aid of legitimate analogies from living dialects, but more often by fantastic etymological devices such as the Notam-kon, or use of analogies from shorthand.
The real service rendered to Hebrew philology by the Talmudic doctors consists not in what they produced but in the knowledge which they preserved from the time when the idiom of the Old Testament was a living tongue. The exaggerated value which their casuistic exegesis attached to every syllable and every letter of the sacred books resulted in a finical preservation, not indeed of the original text, but of the text which had become authoritative, and which is hardly later than the 1st Christian century. And fortunately for later scholarship the period immediately subsequent to the close of the Talmud (about 600 a.d.) devised in the vowel points and accents a means for preserving not merely the consonants of this text but the exact pronunciation and intonation of the synagogue. The idea of this system of punctuation appears to have been taken from a similar usage adopted in Syriac MSS.; the complete development of the idea as we find it in our present Hebrew Bibles must have been reached by successive steps which we cannot now trace. The current punctuation is the work of the Palestinian schools; another system resting on the same foundations was developed in Babylon, and is known from the MSS. of the Petersburg library collected by Firkowitsch, and also from copies brought from Yemen. The difference between the two systems lies more in the notation than in the pronunciation, and neither punctuation can claim absolute priority. The work of the punctuators was peril ips completed in the 7th century. After a time the vowel signs came to be thought as old as the text, but a juster view was revived by Elias Levita (1472-1549), and, after the great controversy in the 16th century between Cappellus and Buxtorf, finally gained universal recognition. With the work of the punctuators is associated the collection by the Massorets of a great mass of notes designed to preserve and illustrate by statistics exceptional phenomena of the Old Testament text, a work which may be viewed as the first step towards scientific study of Hebrew philology.
With all this the old traditional scholarship continued to decline till the 10th century, when a revival of Hebrew study under the influence of Mahometan learning took place among the Arabic-speaking Jews (Saadia of the Fayyum, Menahem ben Sarug, &c.). Then, early in the 11th century, came the acknowledged fathers of mediaeval Jewish philology,—the grammarian Judah surnamed Hayyug, discoverer of the system of triliteral roots, and the lexicographer Abulwalid Merwân ibn Ganâh (Rabbi Jonah), who made excellent use of Arabic analogies as well as of the traditional material. A succession of able scholars continued their work, of whom the most famous are Abraham ben Meir of Toledo, surnamed lbn Ezra (1092-1167), a man of great originality and freedom of view; Solomon Isaaki of Troyes, called Rashi and sometimes by error Jarchi, i.e., of Lunel (died 1105), whose writings are a storehouse of traditional lore; and David Kimchi of Narbonne, called Radak (pire. 1200), whose commentaries, grammar, and lexicon exercised an enormous and lasting influence, and were the chief fountain of knowledge for the Christian Hebraists of the 16th century. Our own authorized version, for example, bears the stamp of Kimchi on every page.
On the Jewish scholars and their works consult Wolf and Bartolocci, also De Rossi, Diziοηαriο Slοricο degli Autori Ebrei, Parma, 1802; on Ibn Ezra in particular, the Introduction to Friedlander’s translation of his Com. on Isaiah (London, 1873), and the same writer’s Essays on the Writings of Ibn Ezra (London, 1877); on the French Rabbins, Histoire Lit. de la France, vol. xvi., but especially vol. xxvii. (1877); on Rashi, Zunz’s Gesammelte Schriften, iii. 100, and a biography by the same scholar, translated into German by Bloch (1840). In the later Middle Ages Jewish learning was cramped by a narrow Talιnudical orthodoxy; but a succession of sound scholars held their ground till Elias Levita and others of his age transmitted the torch to the Christian universities.
Up to the revival of letters there was no productive Hebrew scholarship among Christians. In the Greek and Latin Church the few fathers who, like Origen and Jerome, knew something of the language w ere wholly dependent on their Jewish teachers, and have value forus only as depositaries of Hebrew tradition. Nor was it otherwise in the East. The Syriac version of the Old Testamentis permeated by the influence of the synagogue where it is not guided by the Septuagint, and the homilies of Aphraates are a mine of Jewish tradition. In the Middle Ages some knowledge of Hebrew was preserved in the church by converted Jews and even by Christian scholars, of whom the most notable were the Dominican controversialist Raymundus Martini and the Franciscan Nicolaus de Lyra, through whose popular commentaries the exegesis of Rashi was conveyed to Luther and largely influenced bis interpretation of Scripture. But there was no continuous tradition of Hebrew study apart from the Jews, and in the 15th century, when the revival of independent scholarship kindled the desire to add a third learned tongue to Latin and Greek, only the most ardent zeal could conquer the obstacles that lay in the way. Orthodox Jews refused to teach those who were not of their faith, and on the other hand the bigotry of ignorant churchmen desired nothing better than the entire suppression of Jewish learning. Even books were to be had with the greatest difficulty, at least north of the Alps. In Italy things were somewhat better. Jéws expelled from Spain received favour from the popes. Study was facilitated by the use of the Hebrew printing press, which wιs at work at Reggio as early as 1475, while the whole Hebrew Bible appeared at Soncino in 1488. The cause of learning found its champion among the northern humanists in John Reuchlin(1455-1522), whose Rudimenta (Pforzheim, 1506) opened the door to students, while his victorious contest with Pfefferkorn and the Cologne obscurantists established the claim of Hebrew studies on scholar ship and the church.
The new learning spread fast. Sebastian Münster in Heidelberg, and Paul Büchlein (Fagius) at Isny, Strasburg, and Cambridge, were worthy pupils of the famous and liberal Jewish scholar Levita. France drew teachers from Italy. Santes Pagninus of Lucca was at Lyons; and the trilingual college of Francis I. at Paris, of which Vatablus and Le Mercier soon became the ornaments, attracted among other foreigners Giustiniani, bishop of Nebbio, the editor of the Genoa Psalter of 1516. In Rome the Jewish convert Felix Pratensis taught by invitation of Leo X., whose name and that of the more famous convert J. b. Hayyîm live mainly in connexion with the great Rabbinical Bibles that issued from the Bomberg press at Venice. In Spain, the old home of Jewish scholarship, Hebrew learning was promoted by Cardinal Ximenes, the patron of the Complutensian Polyglot. Printing presses were multiplied, and the great humanist printers, as Froben at Basel and Etienne at Paris, competed with Italy in the production of Hebrew books. In brief, before the middle of the 16th century the place of Hebrew studies was secure throughout learned Europe, while in Protestant countries opposition to the authority of the Vulgate combined with scholarly interest to make the study of the original text of Scripture appear indispensable. Thus in Scotland the establishment of a trilingual course in the universities is contemplated in the first Book of Discipline.
For a time the best Christian scholars leaned mainly on the Rabbins. But in the larger air of humanism a more independent type of learning soon arose, of which Le Mercier in the 16th and Drusius in the beginning of the 17th century may be taken as representatives. The importance of the ancient versions was recognized, and their study was fostered by the publication of the Polyglots.
In the 17th century the cognate dialects were cultivated with great vigour and success by men like Selden, Castell, and Pococke in England, De Dieu in Holland, Bochart in France, Ludolf and Hottinger in Germany; and these studies bore fruit both for the Hebrew grammar and for the lexicon. Rabbinic learning was not forgotten, and found its chief ornament in the elder Buxtorf at Basel, who was also the author of grammars and a handy lexicon which long remained favourite manuals in England and on the Continent.
At the same time a critical spirit arose, which involved Hebrew philology in the meshes of theological controversy. The battle as to the age of the vowel points has already been referred to. It was part of a larger question as to the integrity of the received Hebrew text, and the legitimacy of text criticism, which received dogmatic importance from the prevalence of extreme theories of verbal inspiration in the Protestant Church. Thus the Protestant Cappellus found his main support in the Catholic Church (Morinus, R. Simon), while the authority of the Massoretic text and punctuation was elevated to a dogma in the Formula Consensus Helvetica (1675), not without protest from the wiser Protestantism of France. The critical school had also its extravagances, and an undue depreciation of tradition was one of several false principles that it would be tedious to enumerate, which came into vogue in the latter part of the 17th century, and long continued to impede the progress of scientific Hebrew philology. In the beginning of the 18th century Semitic studies had their chief seat in Holland, where Albert Schultens took up the comparative method with fresh energy, and applied it to Hebrew on a scale which gave a new shape to the study of the language. Schultens laid emphasis on the limited extent of the Old Testament literature, which makes it an inadequate record of the phenomena of the Hebrew language, and proposed to supply these defects by a large use of the dialects, mainly of the Arabic, in which he had wide and accurate reading. His Institutiones ad fundamenta Linguoe Helyroeoe (1737) mark an advance on previous grammars, and in his commentaries is accumulated an enormous mass of material of the highest value for the lexicographer. Schultens founded an influential school, of which Schroeder was the chief ornament; but his method was easily abused, and fell into discredit in the hands of arbitrary expositors like Venema. After Holland, Germany became the chief seat of Hebrew studies. In Halle, where the influence of Francke directed special attention to Biblical learning, there sprang up contemporaneously with the Dutch school a school of Hebraists, —earnest, laborious, and thorough, but somewhat jejune and deficient in aesthetic sympathy,—of which the Michaelis family were the chief representatives. J. D. Michaelis (1717-1791) exercised a sort of sovereignty in Hebrew letters, and the stamp of Halle has left a permanent impress on the German schools, though a more sympathetic and emotional type of scholarship, beginning with Herder and Eichhorn, became dominant under the influence of Ewald.
By the epoch-making labours of Silvestre de Sacy (1758- 1838), which first placed Oriental learning and especially Semitic grammar on a broad and thoroughly scientific footing, a new impulse was given to Hebrew philology, which since that time has moved with the advance of general Semitic studies, and can hardly again fall into devious paths. The great teachers of Hebrew in the present century have been two Germans, Gesenius and Ewald,—the former excelling in method and lucidity of exposition, the latter in range of view and creative fertility of ideas. Among the direct or indirect disciples of these great scholars may be reckoned almost every Hebraist in Europe, and to them is mainly due the revival in England of a branch of learning which had almost become extinct through the prevailing dilettantism of last century.
Helps to the Study of Hebrew.—Grammars. — The principal modern methods are those of Gesenius, Ewald, and Olshausen. Gesenius’s larger work, his Lehrgebäude der hebräischen Sprache, (Leipsic, 1817), is still useful for occasional reference. His smaller grammar has passed through innumerable editions, and in its most recent shape, as recast by Rodiger and finally by Kautzsch (1878), holds its ground as one of the best books for learners. Davies’s version of Rodiger’s Gesenius is the best of several English translations (1869- 1876). The method of Gesenius is mainly empirical. Much more philosophic, but less simple and sometimes arbitrary in its refinements, is the Ausführliches Lehrbuch of Ewald (8th ed., Gottingen, 1870), of which the “Syntax” has been translated into English by Kennedy (1879). The shorter Sprachlehre für Anfänger (4th ed., 1874; Eng. trans, by Smith, 1870) is valuable but too difficult for ordinary beginners. Olshausen’s Lehrbuch (Brunswick, 1861) is incomplete, the syntax having never appeared; but it is, on the whole, the best and most scientific exposition of the Hebrew grammatical forms. Two elementary grammars on Olshausen’s system have been translated into English,—BickelΓs Grundriss (Leipsic, 1869- 1870; English by Curtiss, 1877) and Land’s Hebreeuwsche Grammatica (Amsterdam, 1869; English by Poole, 1876). The latter work has some peculiarities which detract from its utility, and neither Bickell nor Land supplies a proper syntax. Muller’s Schulgrammatik (Halle, 1878) is also mainly on Olshausen’s method with the addition of an excellent syntax. In English A. B. Davidson’s Introductory Hebrew Grammar (3d ed., Edin., 1878) may be commended to beginners as a good practical method and easy introduction to the larger scientific grammars. Of other more extensive works may be named Böttcher’s Ausführliches Lehrbuch, posthumously edited by Mühlau (Leipsic, 1866-68), a huge book serving as a sort of grammatical concordance to the Old Testament; Luzzatto’s Italian Grammatica (Padua, 1853-69), which is valuable from the thorough Jewish scholarship of the author, the Latin grammar of Roorda, and in English the works of Kalisch (1862-63) and Green (New York, 1861). Among useful monographs on special points of grammar may be named Philippi, Wesen und Ursprung des Status Constructus (Weimar, 1,871); S. R. Driver, The Use of the Tenses in Hebrew (Oxford, 1874); Giesebrecht, Die Hebräische proposition Lamed (Halle, 1876); Davidson, Outlines of Hebrew Accentuation (1861). For comparative purposes, in the absence of a comparative system of the Semitic languages, which is hoped for from Renan, the hints in Wright’s Arabic Grammar will be found most valuable.
Lexicons. — Far superior to all other lexicons is the Thesaurus of Gesenius, completed by Rodiger (Leipsic, 1829-1858). Gesenius published also a Handwörterbuch — of which the 8th ed. by Mühlau and Volck (Leipsic, 1877-78) contains a good deal of new matter not always improvement — and a Lexicon Manuale in Latin (2d ed. by Hoffmann, 1847), of which there is an English translation. The Handwörterbuch of Fürst (2d ed., 1863; Eng. trans, by S. Davidson, 1871; 3d ed. by Ryssel, 1876) proceeds on very faulty etymological principles and must be used with great caution. On Hebrew synonyms Pappenheim’s Yrî'ôt Sh’lômôh (1784-1811) is the principal work.
Concordances.— The .Concordantioe of Buxtorf (1632) were reprinted by Beer (1863). Fürst’s Concordance (1840) contains a good deal of supplementary matter, part of which is of little use. For the particles the (incomplete) concordance of Noldius (1679; ed. Tympius, 1734) is useful.
In addition to modern books the advanced student will sometimes find it useful to recur to older works, especially to the Jewish grammarians and lexicographers, but these need not be detailed here.
For the later Hebrew of the period of the Mishna, and for the new words and technical terms in the scholastic Hebrew of the Middle Ages, the best lexicon is Buxtorf’s Lexicon Chaldaicum Talmudicum et Rabbinicum (1640). The recent reprint is not so good. A new lexicon by Levy has been in the course of publication since 1875 {.Neu-hebräisches und Chaldäisches WorterbucK). The beginner will find the Lexicon breve Rabbinico-philosophicurn appended to Buxtorf’s small Lexicon Hebraicum very useful, and may also consult the treatises in Reland’s Analecta Rabbinica (1702). In reading Rabbinical Hebrew it is well to have Selig’s Compendia Vocum Hebraico-Rabbinicarurn (1780). The similar work of Buxtorf is less full.
On the whole subject of this article consult Gesenius, Geschichte der hebräischen Sprache und Schrift (Leipsic, 1817); Renan, Histoire générale des langues Sémitiques (4th ed., Paris, 1864),
