Gary Anderson on Hebrew as the Language of Jesus

Reviewing the endnotes to Gary Anderson’s impressive history of sin (!), I came across this gem on New Testament scholars, Modern Hebrew and the language of Jesus:

Mishnaic Hebrew, in its limited sense, refers to the Hebrew of the Mishnah itself, a relatively early rabbinic work [ca. 200 CE] …. But when we speak of the dialect of Mishnaic Hebrew, we are talking about the living Hebrew language of the first couple of centuries of the Common Era, in other words, the language of Jesus himself.”

“Scholars vary in their opinions as to how fluent Jesus was in the various languages with which he was familiar (Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek). Most New Testament scholars assume that Aramaic was his mother tongue and that Hebrew was a secondary language. …. Part of the problem is that the best scholarship on the Hebrew of the late Second Temple period is being done at the Hebrew University and is written in modern Hebrew. Only a handful of New Testament scholars could follow this discussion, and I know of none who do. As a result, the case being made for Hebrew as a living language in the first and second centuries CE has gone unnoticed.” 

~ Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 95-6, 215 note 1 (emphasis added)

The book itself is a fascinating analysis of a shift from sin conceived as burden to sin conceived as debt, that ranges across the testaments, through rabbinic literature and Christian Syriac, concluding with a rousing defense of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo? I wager that only a handful of Old Testament scholars could attempt such a feat.

Back to the topic of Hebrew as a living language during the Second Temple period: My posts on Jesus’ mother tongue from 15 years ago (!) are here:

Jesus’ Mother Tongue

Jesus' Mother Tongue Part 2: The Supposed Dominance of Aramaic in First Century Galilee

Peter Brown and Learning Languages

Interviews with and bios of Peter Brown routinely mention his extraordinary facility with languages ancient and modern. For example:

Thomas D’Evelyn (1988) for the Christian Science Monitor on the occasion of Brown’s award of a MacArthur Genius grant: “Brown learned modern languages - German, French, Italian, and Russian - before Greek. He knew the impact of the Middle Ages on modern man before he knew the classics, which gave him a unique view of his field.”

The Library of Congress (2008) on the occasion of Brown’s award of the Kluge Prize: "As Brown developed linguistic capacity in Arabic, Persian, Syriac, and Turkish, as well as in the major classical and European languages, he reconceived Western history from the sixth to the 11th century as a pan-Mediterranean era.”

Ruby Shao (2017) in The Daily Princetonian: “Every day, he wakes up at 4 a.m. He then studies up to three languages, each for an hour, using books and recordings. Language learning constitutes Brown’s main hobby. He dismissed his familiarity with over 20 languages as ‘not so difficult,’ given the numerous cognates involved. ‘I speak as many as I need for traveling,’ he said.”

Joseph Epstein (2023) reviewing Brown’s memoir: “In Journeys of the Mind he seems always to be off learning another necessary language, contemporary or ancient, for the composition of his own books. After the Latin and Greek he acquired in school, he learned German and subsequently the modern romance languages. Then there was Hebrew, which he learned ‘as a prelude to Syriac.’ He resolves one day to learn Coptic to be able to read Manichaen in manuscript, and eventually does so. In preparation for travel through the Middle East, he acquires Arabic, also Ottoman and modern Turkish. On page 699, in the penultimate sentence of the last page of his book, he reports, ‘I have begun to read in Ge’ez (in Classical Ethiopic) texts that still echo, at a vast distance of time and space, the controversies and ascetic legends of Syria and Egypt of the fifth and sixth centuries, which had trickled down the Nile and Red Sea to Ethiopia, to yet another “micro-Christendom” founded in late antiquity and still surviving in the Horn of Africa.’”

The part of Brown’s 99-chapter autobiography that left the deepest impression on me is his description of how he went about preparing to write his biography of St. Augustine by reading through Augustine’s entire massive oeuvre in Latin:

“First and foremost, these were years of deep reading. I would sit in a large armchair with a board across the arms and read my way through the folio volumes of the works of Augustine published … between 1679 and 1700. I would work my way down those generous pages noting on a piece of paper the page … and the position … of the passages that interested me. … Then, having read through the entire text, I would return to copy into my notes those passages that I had marked. This method of taking notes had a direct effect on the way in which I absorbed the works of Augustine. I hardly ever made a précis of what Augustine wrote. Instead, I went out of my way to copy by hand every passage in the original Latin. By doing this, I aimed to capture, through citations, not only what Augustine said, but, quite as much, how he said it. By taking notes in this way, I found myself catching his tone of voice.” - Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton University Press), 249.

Later in the book, Brown reflects on the difference between this sort of extensive reading and the fluency that it produces, and grammatical analysis:

“Confronted with a class of keen graduate students, mainly in classics and comparative literature, I suddenly realized that I knew the Confessions inside out—but I did so only as a historian, instinctively looking at it for evidence of Augustine’s life and times. I had never expounded it as a masterpiece of Latin prose. I had been like a window cleaner, wiping a pane of glass until I could see through it into the fourth century. Now I was expected to be a chemist, and to analyze the texture of the glass itself. I had to know how to parse each sentence in correct grammatical terms. … I realized that I had read Augustine’s entrancing Latin for so long that I took it for granted.” - Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind, 566.

All very impressive. But what is the point? Brown puts it this way, in a 2024 interview with Nawal Arjini in The New York Review:

“I travel because it always surprises me. Places and monuments, works of art and landscapes are never quite what one imagines them to be. Nor are people. Some of the languages useful for my research abroad are what we call “dead” languages: Latin, Greek, classical Hebrew, Coptic, Ge’ez (Ethiopic), etc. These are keys to entire past civilizations. But even in the modern world, languages are a reminder that all societies have their own surprises. To attempt to read and use languages other than one’s own, even if only a few phrases, is a mark of respect for the otherness of other people. For this reason, I have always encouraged my students of late antiquity to learn not only the classical languages but the languages in which modern scholarship has been conducted, so that they realize that historical research is a worldwide matter, and that it is many centuries old—like a great symphony that has been playing for centuries.”

Aviya Kushner and the Grammar of God

“When I was a child I assumed that all families discussed the grammar of the Bible in Hebrew at the dining room table. When I entered kindergarten, I heard, to my shock, that most American-born children spoke English; I spoke only Hebrew then. On my first sleepover, I learned that many families did not discuss ancient grammar. Not over dinner, not at all. This struck me as a terrible shame, a missed opportunity, and it still does.”

So begins the Introduction to Aviya Kushner’s The Grammar of God, an enticing enough lede that it convinced me to read the whole book. The audiobook was all I could find for free through our public library system—not ideal because the reader didn’t know Hebrew—but I liked it well enough to order a paper copy. It is a quirky book, sort of a philologist’s memoir that combines reflections on texts and words from the Hebrew Bible with her own experience.

I thought Kushner’s comments about Hebrew, language, and translation worth returning to. Months later, however, what sticks in my head is her stories about her Jewish upbringing in the Hasidic neighbourhood of Monsey, NY, visiting her grandfather in Israel, and locating the house in Germany where he lived before the Shoah.

On her mother, who sounds like a character right out of a Chaim Potok novel:

“My mother had a life of the night. After everyone else went to sleep, she would sit at the dining room table with a large milk-shake and several piles of dictionaries. She was reading Akkadian tablets—I know because I used to wake up at night and watch her, sitting in her nightgown with her very long hair pinned up, from the darkness of the kitchen. Piles of papers and pens before her, she’d talk to herself in some ancient language that she told me you could hear recorded at the Smithsonian Institution. From a room away, I heard the rhyme and rhythm of antiquity. … I thought that all mothers were like that—mothers in the daytime, and something secret between midnight and when everyone else woke up.” (17)

On her mathematician father:

“I got to know my father during Shabbat. Perhaps that is why, in the aseret hadibrot [the Ten Commandments], honoring our parents and keeping Shabbat are neighbors: because time allows us to know, and honor, our own family. Respecting a person requires time. Moreover, and more deeply, the day in which I got to know my father—Shabbat—allowed me to love what I have. … Shabbat was the only time that he was in my sight, not writing and not doing, for all three meals and all the hours in between. I think that in that long expanse, in the Shabbats and all the hours in them, I met him.” (132-3)

On arriving in Bremen, Germany:

“My mother and I are both silenced by what we see when we get out of the train. We are standing in the Hauptbahnhof, the central train station, the place my grandfather had described hundreds of times as the place he last saw his parents and his four brothers …. My grandfather was twenty-two. His youngest brother was thirteen. … I remember the way my grandfather said: ‘I was just a boy. I was so sure I would see them again. I don’t even think I turned around to wave, to say goodbye.” (172)

C.S. Lewis on Learning to Think in Greek

George Sayer's account of how C. S. Lewis learned to think in Greek stuck in my head when I read it years ago:

"With his strongly guttural Ulster accent, Kirkpatrick would read about twenty lines of the Iliad or whatever work they were studying, translate about a hundred lines quickly and roughly, and then tell his pupil to go through it in detail with a grammar book and a dictionary, while he went back into the garden. At first Jack found it difficult in the time allotted to work through more than about twenty of the lines that the 'grinder' had translated, but before long he was able to work through even more than had been read aloud. He found that he could think in Greek." - George Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times (Harper & Row, 1988), 93-94

I don't much care for the method, but "thinking in Greek" is surely the goal--or shows that the goal of reading fluently has been reached.

I rather suspect Lewis's own experience of learning to think in Greek lies behind this passage in chapter 19 of Out of the Silent Planet:

"To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within. For Ransom, this moment had now come in his understanding of Malacandrian song. Now first he saw that its rhythms were based on a different blood from ours, on a heart that beat more quickly, and a fiercer internal heat. Through his knowledge of the creatures and his love for them he began, ever so little, to hear it with their own ears. A sense of great masses moving at visionary speeds, of giants dancing, of eternal sorrows eternally consoled, of he knew not what and yet what he had always known, awoke in him with the very first bars of the deep-mouthed dirge, and bowed down his spirit as if the gate of heaven had opened before him." 

It is worth noting that when Lewis describes the process of learning another language in Out of the Silent Planet, the approach he describes is conversational.

Seth Schwartz on the value of learning Arabic

"Special benefits will accrue to those willing to learn languages outside the comfort zones traditional to the field, in particular Jewish Aramaic, for Christian scholars, Christian Aramaic for Jewish scholars, and Arabic for everyone." - Seth Schwartz

So reads the final sentence in Seth Schwartz latest excellent book, The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge: CUP, 2014).

Schwartz does not say whether or not the promised benefits include a tenure track job.

My youngest Hebrew student

I started teaching Shoshana the Hebrew alphabet to vary her bed-time routine. Then I gave her Hebrew alphabet magnets for Christmas to help her learn the shapes. The first time she recited them all on her own she announced,

"I'm learning! Pretty soon I'll be able to go to SBL!"

This evening I showed her the first few videos from the Biblical Language Center's excellent Living Biblical Hebrew MP4. As it turns out, she's been making pretty good progress on the numbers too:

Click here for a sample of the first Living Biblical Hebrew picture lesson. Simple enough "that even a child can follow," as they say.

Jesus' Mother Tongue Part 2: The Supposed Dominance of Aramaic in First Century Galilee

My aim in this post is not to demonstrate that Hebrew rather than Aramaic was the dominant language in the first century or that Jesus taught in Hebrew rather than Aramaic, but to raise some questions about the nature of the evidence.

(1) As I mentioned in part 1, it is often claimed that the Greek words Hebrais and Hebraisti should be translated "Aramaic" instead of "Hebrew." In response I will simply quote from Ken Penner, whose argument I find persuasive:

In summary, all the anomalies to the otherwise consistent ancient distinction between Hebrew and Aramaic can be accounted for: First, John's Rabbouni can be considered a Hebrew word. Second, Josephus and Philo's Pascha and sabbata are taken directly from the Septuagint, and Asarta has a final alpha to aid pronunciation. Third, John's three place names called Hebraisti, namely Bethzatha, Gabbatha, and Golgotha should not be given much weight in the light [of] the resistance of proper names to translation. Thus all the apparently Aramaic words cited could easily have been used in Hebrew speech. Finally, Philo's claim that the Bible is written in chaldean is insubstantial, given that he probably knew neither Hebrew nor Aramaic. To refute the claim in the lexicon that Hebrais "refers to the Aramaic spoken at that time in Palestine," only one of the following three premises must be conceded. I have demonstrated the first two: First, Hebrais(ti) normally means Hebrew; second, Hebrais(ti) never certainly means Aramaic; and third, Hebrew was a spoken language in first century Palestine. This last premise has also now been generally conceded . . . (p. 10)

(2) Scholars who accept that both Aramaic and Hebrew were widely used often suggest that Aramaic was more common in Galilee, while Hebrew was more common in Jerusalem and its environs:

• Chaim Rabin* concluded in 1976 that "while in Jerusalem mishnaic Hebrew was a home language and probably already also a literary language, and Aramaic a lingua franca, in Galilee Aramaic was a home language and mishnaic Hebrew the upper language of a diglossia" (1036).
• Michael Wise** agrees, though he is less confident about the use of Hebrew: "The fact that the region [of Galilee] came under Jewish control only after some centuries of government by Aramaic and Greek-speaking rulers suggests that Hebrew was much less well known in Galilee than it would have been in Judea. . . . With the passage of time Aramaic became the most widely spoken language in Syria and Palestine, and, presumably, among the Jews, with the possible exception of the Jews of Judea" (437).
• Mark Roberts refers to the "fact" that Aramaic was "the official language of Galilee": "It makes sense that residents of Nazareth spoke Aramaic, given the fact that Aramaic became the official language of Galilee from the sixth-century B.C. onward. Thus, it seems likely that ordinary residents of Galilee, including Nazareth, spoke Aramaic as their first language. This was the language of common discourse among Jesus' family and friends."

The problem with Roberts' assertion, in particular, is that Galilee came under Jewish/Judaean Hasmonean control in the second century BCE. Since there is strong evidence for Hasmonean preference for Hebrew, it is at least possible that Hebrew spread widely during this period among the Jews in Galilee. To be sure, this is an argument from silence. Wise** notes that written evidence for the use of Hebrew applies "only to Judea. . . . Similar evidence for Galilee is entirely lacking" (437). But Wise cites no epigraphic evidence that Aramaic was spoken in Galilee either. (There are inscriptions from late antiquity, but I know of no Galilaean Aramaic inscriptions dated to the Second Temple Period. I confess my ignorance: are there any? Scratch that: According to this article by Mark Chancey, there are perhaps two Galilaean Hebrew or Aramaic inscriptions from the Second Temple period. If there is little or no written evidence, both sides argue from silence--at least with respect to written evidence.

(3) Scholars now rightly avoid citing Rabbinic literature without further ado as evidence for first century usage. The reason is simple: Literature written after 200 CE must be examined first for what it says about the time in which it was composed (or compiled); it cannot be read as direct evidence for speech and practice hundreds of years earlier. It is worth noting, however, that the earliest Rabbinic literature (the Mishnah, the Tosefta) is preserved in Hebrew not Aramaic.

(4) As Wise** explains, the evidence from the Gospels about the language of Jesus is extraordinarily difficult to assess. In a bilingual context "Aramaic words might appear, for example, in the course of a conversation conducted mainly in Hebrew or vice versa; such phenomena are commonly observed in the speech of modern bilinguals" (442). Apart from the Aramaic command recorded in Mark 5:41,

"The other verbal sentences recorded as Jesus' direct speech . . . [Mark 7:34; Mark 15:34 and Matt 27:46] . . . are problematic as to language. . . . Thus it is impossible to be certain whether on these occasions Jesus spoke Hebrew or Aramaic. As a result, based on Mark 5:41 one can only say that Jesus certainly spoke Aramaic on occasion. This much was to be expected on the basis of our knowledge of the dominant language among the Jews of Galilee" (542).

I would merely add that "our knowledge of the dominant language among the Jews of Galilee" rests on inference; it seems not nearly as well-founded as is commonly supposed.

In the end I remain agnostic about Jesus' mother tongue. I assume Jesus was at least bilingual; he may well have taught in both languages. (I am not persuaded by arguments that Jesus taught in Greek.) I'd like to think he taught primarily in Hebrew, but see no way of knowing for sure. When I talk about Jesus' original language, I refer to "Hebrew/Aramaic" just to be safe.

Bibliography:

*Rabin, Chaim. “Hebrew and Aramaic in the First Century.” Pages 1007-1039 in The Jewish People in the First Century: Section One: Historical Geography, Political History, Social, cultural and Religious Life and Institutions. Edited by Shmuel Safrai and Menahem Stern. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976. 

**Michael O. Wise, "Languages of Palestine." Pages 434-44 in The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (IVP: 1992).

See also David Goodblatt, "Constructing Jewish Nationalism: The Hebrew Language." Pages 49-70 in Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.  

Jesus' Mother Tongue

That Jesus' mother tongue was Aramaic, not Hebrew, is one of those "assured" results of modern scholarship that has filtered down into popular consciousness--assisted, no doubt, by the Aramaic script to Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ as well as by modern English translations. BDAG, the standard Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, explains that although the noun ἑβραΐς (hebrais) means "the Hebrew language," it is used to "refer to the Aramaic spoken at that time in Palestine." The lexicon entry shows how firmly entrenched this view is in New Testament scholarship; it also contributes to its continued dominance. Among modern translations, the NIV, TNIV, NLT, NET, follow the lexicon's lead by translating ἑβραΐς by Aramaic instead of Hebrew when it appears in the New Testament (Acts 21:40; 22:2; 26:14; cf. the adjective, Ἑβραϊστί [hebraisti] in John 5:2; 19:13, 17, 20; 20:16; Rev 9:11; 16:16).

It may come as a surprise, then, to discover that scholars of post-exilic Hebrew and Aramaic agree that Hebrew continued as a spoken language until the 3rd century AD:

• Moshe Bar-Asher*: "Research has further shown that Hebrew was spoken in Palestine until roughly 200 CE. The view is generally accepted that the Hebrew preserved in Tannaic literature reflects living speech current in various regions of Palestine" (568). "The theory was once proposed that MH had never been a living language, but an artificial creation, and that the Jews in the Tannaic period had spoken Aramaic exclusively. This view has now been universally abandoned" (586 n. 74). (See below for full bibliography.) 
• Yohanan Breuer**: "Today . . .  everyone agree[s] that Hebrew speech survived in all walks of life at least until the end of the Tannaic period (beginning of the third century CE)" (598).

I suspect most pastors and more than a few scholars simply repeat what they learned when they were in school--namely, that the Jews of Jesus' day spoke Aramaic rather than Hebrew and therefore that Jesus taught in Aramaic. This view rests on the outdated scholarship of past giants such as Gustaf Dalman, who wrote before the great manuscript discoveries of the 20th century (the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Bar Kokhba letters).

The standard position among those who actually study the question has changed, however. As the quotations from Bar-Asher and Breuer show, scholars of the linguisitic setting of first century Palestine agree that both Hebrew and Aramaic were spoken languages. To be sure, there is debate about how common each language was. On one side, Joseph Fitzmyer*** concluded that Aramaic was the vernacular, and that even Greek was more common than Hebrew: "pockets of Palestinian Jews also used Hebrew, even though its use was not widespread" (46). As far as I can tell, most linguists of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic now give more prominence to Hebrew than Fitzmyer did in 1970, and the standard view is now that most Palestinian Jews in the first century--including Jesus--would have been bilingual in Aramaic and Hebrew, at least to some extent, and possibly trilingual in Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek.

This, of course, does not prove anything about Jesus' mother tongue or his normal language of instruction. The majority of scholars still seem to conclude that, as a Galilaean, Jesus' mother tongue was Aramaic and that he most likely taught primarily in Aramaic. This is the conclusion of Mark D. Roberts in a fine recent blog series (scroll down and begin reading at the bottom; most of the series is also collected here) as well as Michael O. Wise****, who concludes wisely: "In view of all the unproven assumptions and complexities involved with the question of Semitic sources behind the Gospels, it is no exaggeration to say that even after 150 years of scholarly effort, research is still at a very early stage" (444).

For my part, I am impressed with how little evidence there is for Aramaic dominance in Galilee, and I am convinced by my friend Ken Penner's excellent paper  (online here) that both ἑβραΐς (hebrais) and Ἑβραϊστί (hebraisti) should be translated "Hebrew" when they appear in the New Testament. But more on this in part 2.

_________

Bibliography:

*Moshe Bar-Asher, "Mishnaic Hebrew: An Introductory Survey," in The Literature of the Sages: Second Part: Midrash, and Targum; Liturgy, Poetry, Mysticism; Contracts, Inscriptions, Ancient Science and the Languages of Rabbinic Literature  (Fortress, 2007), 567-595.
**Yohanan Breuer, "The Aramaic of the Talmudic Period," in The Literature of the Sages: Second Part: Midrash, and Targum; Liturgy, Poetry, Mysticism; Contracts, Inscriptions, Ancient Science and the Languages of Rabbinic Literature  (Fortress, 2007),597-625.
***Joseph Fitzmyer, "The Languages of Palestine in the First Century A.D." Catholic Biblical Quarterly 32 (1970): 501-31, reprinted in A Wandering Aramaean (Scholars Press: 1979; Eerdmans: 1997), 29-56.
****Michael O. Wise, "Languages of Palestine." Pages 434-44 in The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (IVP: 1992).

Other sources:

Rabin, Chaim. “Hebrew and Aramaic in the First Century.” Pages 1007-1039 in The Jewish People in the First Century: Section One: Historical Geography, Political History, Social, cultural and Religious Life and Institutions. Edited by Shmuel Safrai and Menahem Stern. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976. 

I haven't yet read these two essays mentioned by Jeffrey Garcia: Shmuel Safrai, “Literary Languages in the Time of Jesus”; Hanan Eshel, “Use of the Hebrew Langauge in Economic Documents from the Judeaen Desert” in Jesus’ Last Week (eds. S. Notley, M. Turnage, and B. Becker; Leiden; Brill, 2006).

Biblical Languages "Teen Challenge"

Here's John Hobbin's with a variation on Teen Challenge:

"Permit me to dream for a moment. How about a Teen Challenge program of memorization of Scripture in the original languages? Going into the program, inductees would have to have a firm grasp of the languages already, and a commitment to detox from a culture that tells them it’s normal to know dialogue from their favorite TV shows and song from their favorite songstresses by heart, but not Psalm 23 in Hebrew and 1 Corinthians 13 in Greek even if they studied the requisite languages for years. Coming off the program, graduates would be able to pick up their original language Bibles and sight-read a core of important passages with ease and pleasure. A foundation on which to build." (Read the whole post here.)

"My" computer is back, by the way. It's actually a different computer, but with everything set up and (mostly) running the way I had it before. I now have a recent backup of my data too. Nice!

F.F. Bruce on the Study of Greek, Evangelicals and Scripture

F.F. Bruce (1910-1990) was one of the 20th century's greatest and most well-known evangelical scholars. The following are excerpts from his memoir, In Retrospect: Remembrance of Things Past (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980):

On Greek:

• “By all accounts, verse composition in Greek and Latin is not much cultivated nowadays. That is a pity. But it is a much greater pity that less and less importance is attached even to prose composition in these languages. It is impossible to attain real mastery in the handling of any language whether ancient or modern, without practising composition in it” (73 n. 3).
• “Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon deals primarily with classical Greek, but no student of the New Testament can afford to ignore classical usage. I have met students who claimed to ‘know Greek’ on the basis of their acquaintance with the Greek New Testament; even if that latter acquaintance were exhaustive, it would no more amount to a knowledge of Greek than acquaintance with the English New Testament would amount to a knowledge of English. There is a story told of A. S. Peake writing a Greek word on the blackboard of his Manchester classroom, and one of his students saying, ‘You needn’t write it down, Doctor; we know Greek.’ To which he replied, ‘I wish I did.’ To know a language, even an ancient language, involves having such a feeling for its usage that one can tell, almost as by instinct, whether a construction is permissible or not, or whether a translation is possible or not” (293).

On Evangelicals and Scripture:

• "I am always happy to be called an evangelical, although I insist on being an unqualified evangelical. I do not willingly answer, for example, to such a designation as ‘conservative evangelical’. (Many of my positions are indeed conservative; but I hold them not because they are conservative – still less because I myself am conservative – but because I believe they are the positions to which the evidence leads.)” (309).
• “I suppose much depends on the cast of one’s mind, but I have never been bothered by ‘apparent discrepancies’, nor have I been greatly concerned to harmonize them. My faith can accommodate such ‘discrepancies’ much more easily than it could swallow harmonizations that place an unnatural sense on the text or give an impression of special pleading. If the ‘discrepancies’ are left unharmonized, they may help to a better appreciation of the progress of revelation or of the distinctive outlooks of individual writers” (312).

The whole thing makes for rewarding reading, though you should be prepared for insider stories about the Plymouth Brethren.

The difference between Greek teachers and Greek scholars

Just before E.F. Benson's description of the great (if also unproductive) scholar, Walter Headlam, Benson contrasts Headlam with his Classics colleagues at Cambridge:

"Those who lectured, those who taught, those who, like Mr Nixon, looked over our weekly efforts in Latin prose or Greek Iambics were not scholars at all in any real sense of the word: their knowledge of these languages was of the same class as that of the twenty or twenty-five undergraduates who yearly took a first in the Classical Tripos. They knew the principal dates and main operations in the Peloponnesian war, they could translate passages of Greek and Latin into grammatical English, and they could turn passages of English prose into Greek that probably bore the same relation to classical Greek, as written in the age of Pericles, as the best Baboo does to plain decent English prose of the day. ...Had any of them competed in the Classical tripos of the year, they would probably have taken quite good degrees, but there their attainments ended, and their years of teaching had not taught them anything that differentiated them from their more intelligent pupils. Their knowledge of Greek ended just about where Walter Headlam's began: his mind was Greek, and he kept on learning the lore of its ancestors." (E.F. Benson, As We Were: A Victorian Peep Show [London: Longmans, 1930], 116; cf. the Google Books edition here)

I fear that the contemporary Greek and Hebrew profs who meet Benson's description of scholars "in any real sense of the word" are few and far between. I don't aspire to Headlam's eccentric unproductivity, but I don't wish to be like his non-scholar colleagues either.

Our standard Western methods of Greek and Hebrew teaching exacerbate the problem. I sense increasing agreement that the immersion method proposed by Randall Buth is a good way to go forward. Why is it that we can claim to know Greek without being able to read (much less communicate) with the ease with which someone who "knows" German can read German literature?

Someone else to watch is John F. Hobbins, who writes:

"If you want to learn ancient Hebrew so as to savor its sounds, understand the nuances of its words and expressions, and recognize the formal structures of its poetry and prose, then you will seek to make the language your own. A standard test of linguistic competence is the ability to engage in simultaneous translation from one language to the other, unaided by a dictionary. When you are able to translate ancient Hebrew into your mother tongue without the aid of a dictionary, you will have moved in the right direction. When you are able to translate from your mother tongue into ancient Hebrew without the help of a dictionary, you will have attained a degree of active competence in the language. Your sense of accomplishment will be great, and rightly so."

Hobbins has a whole series on Learning Ancient Hebrew which is worth consulting for his insights on pedagogy. Look for the list in the left column of his Ancient Hebrew Poetry blog.

שׁוֹשַׁנָּה אֲבִגָיִל and the Problem of the Dagesh Forte

It's official: We named our daughter שׁוֹשַׁנָּה אֲבִגָיִל. (She had to have a name before they released her from the hospital on Saturday, but for a variety of reasons involving a newborn baby it has taken me awhile to post the name here.)


The trouble with choosing Hebrew names is that one must decide how to spell them in English. Transliterating the middle name, אֲבִגָיִל, is straightforward and, because it appears in 1 Samuel 25 as the name for King David's second wife (formerly married to Nabal), and is relatively common in English, everyone knows how to spell and pronounce Abigail.

Unlike Abigail, שׁוֹשַׁנָּה is never used as a proper name in the Hebrew Bible. Strict adherence to the rules of transliteration would result in Shoshannah. We decided to do away with the final 'h' because it is silent, but the dagesh forte (the raised dot) in the 'nun' (נּ) created a small dilemma. The dagesh strengthens the consonant, which is normally represented in transliteration by a doubling of the letter--in this case, two n's. t. observed that the double 'n' might help in English pronunciation since English speakers expect the 'a' to be a long ah vowel before a double consonant, and a short eh vowel before a single consonant. The single consonant could have people pronouncing her name 'Shoshane-ah' instead of 'Shoshawnah. I preferred Shoshana to Shoshanna, however, and reasoned that the name was common enough for this not to be an issue. And so we went with Shoshana.

(A google search confirmed that the spelling Shoshana is more common than Shoshanna. I suspect this is because it is a predominantly Jewish name. Since Modern Hebrew is written without vowels or dageshes, the dagesh does not play a role in transliteration.)

It turns out that Shoshana is not at all common in these parts. No one seems to have heard the name before or to be sure how to pronounce it. I haven't heard 'Shoshane-ah' yet, but 'Shoshahnah' is a common first attempt. For the record, Shoshana is pronounced 'Shoshawna.'

In case you are wondering, Shoshana is the Hebrew word for lily (apparently including the water lily or lotus; see Song of Solomon 2:1-2; Hos 14:6). Although it is not used as a proper name in the Old Testament, the Greek transliteration of Shoshana appears in the story of Susannah in the Apocrypha; in Luke 8:3 a Susanna is included among the women who traveled with Jesus and the twelve and "who provided for them out of their resources."

Abigail means "my father was delighted." Fitting.

Mark Twain on the German Language

I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl; for nowadays, whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless trans-continental sentences of hers, it was born in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German language. I was so impressed with this, that sometimes when she began to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously took the very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words had been water, I had been drowned, sure. She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 258-9 (chapter 22).