The separation of the sources and the fixing of the dates of the pieces composing the OT has been attempted with varying success by modern critics. Neither the earliest nor the latest verse in the OT can be named with certainty, but there is probably none either earlier than 1100, or later than 100 B.c. That the earliest fragments were in verse must not be hastily assumed, since the Oriental peoples employ verse not only to commemorate, but also to glorify the past; and, owing to the considerations that have already been urged, the verses which are occasionally quoted in the older historical books in connexion with particular events must, until further discoveries of literature, be located rather by religious and political than by linguistie data.
The continuity of the Hebrew language would seem to have been finally snapped with the taking of Jerusalem by the Romans ; circumstances having forced the survivors of that catastrophe to adopt some other idiom for the ordinary needs of lite, though it has not ceased to carry on a sort of existence to this day, partly as a learned language, partly as a vehicle of communication for members of the Jewish community throughout the world. The commencement of its decay is no doubt to be dated from the time when acquaintance with another language was necessary for high offices of State; and this would seem to have been the case in Hezekiah’s time (Is 36"), and was prob- ably the case earlier. During the first exile and after it, acquaintance with some other language was requisite, not only for the official, but for the ordinary householder ; and though Nehemiah busied himself with the maintenance of the Jewish language in its purity (13°"-), his own style gives us no exalted notion of his standard in that matter. The question, however, of the precise epoch at which Hebrew ceased to be a living language is fraught with considerable difficulty, owing to the dearth of materials for settling it. es oe who survived the Fall of Jerusalem, says (BJ, Preface,
* e.g. ΜΘ ‘to despise,’ mb’ for ‘a witness’ y>3n7.
t Driver's Introductionto the Literature of the OT contains important observations on the usage of the different writers.
{ Thus the author of the historical manual Al-FakAri (εἶτα. 1250) quotes the verses of the poet at Al-Radi (circ. 100" on Omar tt. (οὗ. 720).
34 LANGUAGE OF THE OLD TEST.
LANGUAGE OF THE OLD TEST.
§ 1), that being a Hebrew, he had written a history of the war in his native language; but when he proceeds to state that the whole East, down to the remotest of the Arabs, had access to that work, such a description applies better to Aramaic than to Hebrew. The passages in the writings of the liabbis which bear on this question are too late to give trustworthy information.*
7. Biblical Aramaic.—The earliest Aramaic docu- mients which we possess are the inscriptions first ec eirs by E. Sachau in the Collections of the
erlin Museum for 1893, which certify the existence of a written Aramaic language for the early part of the 8th cent. B.c., or earlier, just as the inscrip- tions on babes and indorsements on Assyrian contracts, collected in the second volume of the CIS, certify it for the latter half of the 8th cent. and later. The opinion of M. Maspero, (/.c.) that evidence for the existence of the Aramaic language is to be found in far earlier Egyptian documents, is now accepted by Egyptologists. As has already been observed, the oldest Aramaic is without a number of the characteristics that serve to dis- tinguish the later language from Canaanitish ; but it seems possible that this phenomenon is in part due to the influence of the Canaanitish orthography, since the Aramaic representation of the letters th and dh does not seem derivable from the Canaanitish and old Aramaic sh and z, whereas it is easily deriv- able from those letters themselves. In grammar this language shows some striking affinity with the S. Arabian dialect Saban ; but in vocabulary the earliest Aramaic seems to agree remarkably with Canaanitish, and though several words which are ordinary in Aramaic only figure in poetical language in Heb., this is what is frequently found in the case of kindred nations.
The area within which the Aramaic language was employed seems even in Babylonian times to have been very great; we have Aramaic inscrip- tions and papyri found in Syria, Babylonia, Egypt, and Arabia, which there are good grounds for regarding as earlier than Cyrus. Its employment even in the 8th cent. B.c. as a diplomatic Taiguage (Is 36") implies an Aramaic hegemony either in politics or literature of some previous century ; for it seems clear that the only languages ever em- ployed in this way are such as have for one of these reasons become important to members of many nationalities. The Aramaic verse in Jer (10") is shown by the form of the word ‘earth,’ and the termination of the word ‘shall perizh,’ to belong to the earliest form of Aramaic of which we have cognizance ; but the fact that the ordinary Aramaic for ‘earth’ occurs in the second half of the verse shows that no confidence can be placed in the tradition, and it is highly probable that the old Aramaic forms should restored throughout. The influence of Assyrian on the old Aramaic was very considerable in matters affecting vocabulary— such as to leave a permanent mark on the language; but on the grammar and syntax it would seem to have had either less effect or a different effect from that which it exercised on Canaanitish. The accession of the Persians to world-empire seems to have again ely affected the Aramaic vocabu- lary ; and the documents in Ezra which belong to the Persian pened bear witness to the influx of Persian words, which, if these documents are genuine, the language must almost at the com- mencement of that period have undergone. The idiom of these documents agrees remarkably with that of the papyri edited in CJS (ii. Nos. 145 ff.), which some scholars have suspected of Jewish origin, The Aramaic parts of Daniel are char-