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Saturday, December 14, 2019

Classical vs. Late Biblical Hebrew

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Biblical Hebrew Phases: A Case Study. (Ronald S. Hendel and Jan Joosten).
The contrast between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew is best illustrated by juxtaposing two extracts of biblical prose narrative, one from each corpus.
It is a challenge to make this case in a popular essay using very little Hebrew. But I think Hendel and Joosten do a pretty good job.

See here for another brief presentation of their case, which is given fully in their book, How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study (Yale University Press, 2018). For more online discussion and reviews, start here and follow the links.

Cross-file under Philology.

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