(c) The employment of other languages than these in the OT aes not exceed the quotation of isolated words and phrases, or calling attention to varieties of nomenclature. Besides the Aramaic equivalent for Gilead cited in Gn 31”, Egyptian is quoted ib. 413: 45. (JE), Moabite Dt 24, Ammonite ἐδ. v., Sidonian and Amorite id. 3°, Tyrian 1 καὶ 9, Persian (7) Est 3’, Babylonian (?) Dn 4°, per-
* Delitzsch (Handwérterbuch, 8.0. ‘hilini’) suggests that Hittite is meant here. It would seem, however, that the words are easily explicable as Canaanitish (cf. Jer 2214), and B.
Meissner (Noch einmal das Bit Hillani, 1893) thinks this does not admit of a doubt.
tIn the Babylonian Gemara 2) at any rate sometimes means a foreign language, e.g. Shabbath, 115a.
LANGUAGE OF THE OLD TEST.
25
haps Philistian Is 2°. Moreover, it may be observed that, in speaking of dignitaries, biblical writers are ordinarily (not invariably) careful to give them their native titles: see Ex 1515, Jos 13*2!, Ezk 23%, Hos 10°, Est 18 413 810. Dn 3? ete.
2. Antiquity.—The Hebrew language may be appropriately termed the Israelitish dialect of Canaanitish. Outside the OT the chief pre-Alex- andrian monuments of the Israelitish dialect which we possess appear to be an inscribed weight in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, found at Nablis, and the Siloam inscription (Driver, Notes on Samuel, p. xv), probably of the age of Hezekiah. But of other Canaanitish dialects we possess far earlier monuments. - The oldest of these are the
glosses of the Tel el-Amarna tablets (see Winckler’s edition in the AJB, 1896). The writers of these epistles sometimes accompany their Assyrian with a Canaanitish equivalent, using, of course, the cuneiform character for both (examples are 181. 5 khalkaat, explained by abada, ‘ perished’ ; 189. 16 ana shamé by shamima, ‘heavenward’; 191. 24 sise by suusu, ‘horse’; 189. 18 kakkadunu by rushunu, ‘our head’). It may be noted as a peculiarity of the writers’ dialect that the sub- stantive verb in it would appear to have drawn some of its tenses from the stem in use in Pheen- ician (and Arabic), and others from the stem in use in Hebrew (and Aramaic). ‘If you say ‘una,’ says one writer, ‘I will answer yahya’ (149. 36). These tablets are assigned to the 15th cent. B.c., but the existence of the Canaanitish language is certified for a yet earlier period by some of the loan-words found in Egyptian monuments, some of which go back to the 16th century or earlier. The bulk, however, of these loan-words occur in papyri of the 14th and 13th cents. B.C. Maspero, who first brought this fascinating snbject into prominence (in his Lpistolographie Egyptienne, 1873), thought that during those centuries the employment of Semitic words was in fashion among the upper classes in Egypt ; and if this opinion be correct, it follows that the Canaan- itish language must by then have reached a high state of development. This opinion, however, was not shared by J. H. Bondi, who, in his disser- tation on these words (Leipzig, 1886), collected as
nny as sixty-five of them; while a still greater number was collected by W. Max Miiller (in his
Asien und Europa, 1893), who has since (in the volume dedicated to Ebers, 1897) tracked out a few in the celebrated Papyrus Ebers, which deals with medical prescriptions. Whether their introduction into Egyptian was the work of the upper or the lower classes, the variety of the spheres of thought to which they belong is such as to allow of their being compared with the words afterwards borrowed by the Copts from the Greeks. The unsatisfactory nature of the Egyptian transcription renders them somewhat less amenable to grammatical analysis than the Tel el-Amarna glosses. Of the remain- ing monuments of the Canaanitish language, the inscription on a patera dedicated to Baal-Lebanon in Pheenician (C/S i. No. 5) is probably the oldest, while the Mesha stele (of the time of Jehoshaphat of Judah) approaches most nearly to the Israelitish idiom, being in Moabitic; of the other Phoenician | inscriptions, that of Byblus (CJS, i. 1) approxi- mates to Hebrew, but the most important is doubtless the Eshmunazar inscription (CJS i. 3), about the time of Alexander the Great. From
Palestine the Canaanitish language was carried by Pheenician colonists to Africa, the islands and harbours of the Mediterranean, and Spain. Here it was supplanted first by Greek, and then more extensively by Latin; but would seem to have | survived as a spoken language down to the Sth | cent. B.C., and perhaps later.
26 LANGUAGE OF THE OLD TEST.
3. Origin.—The Canaanitish language belongs to the Semitic family, and is closely allied to the Arabic, t.c. the language made world-famous by the conquests of Mohammed and his successors. These are the only languages of the Semitic family that have, in regular use, (1) a prefixed article, leading to a variety of syntactical rules; (2) an interrogative prefix of a single letter,* as well as a syllabic prefix of the same import (Dt 32°); (3) a series of passive conjugations, formed by a change of vowel from the active;+ (4) a regular conjugation Niphal; }—Canaanitish has, moreover, considerable remnants of (5) a case system ; (6) an infinitive system ; (7) a mood system identical with those of classical Arabic. The theory represented in the grammar of J. Olshausen (Brunswick, 1861), according to which the relation of Hebrew to Arabic is that of daughter to mother (in the sense in which these metaphors may be used of languages), is that which best suits the facts;§ and indeed the proximate ancestors of Hebrew forms can in the great majority of cases be easily found in Arabic. The apparent absurdity of deriving so ancient a language as Canaanitish from one of which the earliest monuments in our possession are so recent, disappears in the face of the over- whelming evidence which comparative grammar can produce. The earliest specimens of classical Arabic that have come down to us are not, indeed, earlier than the 6th cent. A.D.; and though numerous inscriptions in other dialects have been discovered in both S. and N. Arabia, the dialect of the Koran is scarcely represented in any stone monuments earlier than the composition of that book. There is, however, no doubt that the Mo- hammedans inherited a literary language, which prevailed over the greater part of the Arabian peninsula, with slight differences of dialect. But for the early history of that language we cannot go to Mohammedan writers, but are left to what we can infer.