Hebrew of Jesus

Hebrew of Israel

Pre-Roman Periods
Persian Period

* Persian Period 539-333 BCE
* Hebrew was the local spoken language: dialects include Late Biblical Hebrew.
* Most of the Hebrew-speaking Jews were never exiled to Bavel. Only the elites were. The villagers remained in the Land of Israel (ancient Judah/Judea) and continued to speak Late Biblical Hebrew.
* Imperial Aramaic was a literary language of the educated elites: the language of the Persian imperial administration, international commerce, and scribal activity across the Mideast.

Hellenistic Period

* Hellenistic Period 333-165 BCE
* Hebrew was a local spoken language: dialects include Late Biblical Hebrew, Dead Sea Scrolls Hebrew.
* After Alexander, the elite became the "Greek-speaker" (Greek: []).
* Koine Greek was the international language of government, commerce and scribal activity across the Eastern Mediterranean.
* Nevertheless Jewish communities in the Land of Israel maintained ties with Jewish communities abroad in Babylon and elsewhere in the Mideast, and Aramic remained an important language for international commerce and a common legal language.

Hasmonian Period

* Hasmonean Period 165-63 BCE
* Hebrew was a local spoken language: dialects include Dead Sea Scrolls Hebrew.
* Late Biblical Hebrew formalizes as a sacred literary dialect, but vernacular Hebrew dialects continue to evolve and break through the literary texts sporadically.
* Dead Sea Scrolls Hebrew includes several evolving and overlapping spoken dialects emerging out of Late Biblical Hebrew and into Mishnaic Hebrew.

Early Roman Period

* Early Roman Period 63 BCE-70 CE
* In the days of Jesus
* Hebrew was a local spoken language: dialects include Dead Sea Scrolls Hebrew and, especially in Galilee, Mishnaic Hebrew.
* The Land of Israel, including Judea in the south and Galilee in the north, was a trilingual society of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, expressing its complexity of speech everywhere in the Land: in the inscriptions, documents, Gospels, Mishna, and many other texts.

Aramaic Targum of Job?

* The Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran comprise a large library that is mostly (90% to 95%) Hebrew, with some Aramaic and even less Greek.
* Possibly, the ratio of languages in the Qumran Scrolls reflects the wider linguistic environment of the Land of Israel during the Early Roman Period. If so, Hebrew is the language of Israel, while Aramaic is a significant but small minority, and Greek even smaller.
* In the Qumran Scrolls, there is one or more copies of a Targum of the Book of Job, in an eastern (non-local) dialect of Aramaic, which was copied locally. However no Targum for any other biblical book is present, much less an Aramaic Bible.
* Across the Mideast, Aramaic-speaking and Greek-speaking communities required translations of the Hebrew Bible. Any presence of the Greek Septuagint and the Aramaic Targums in Israel is evidence of contact with the communities that speak these languages, but is not evidence about indigenous communities that speak Hebrew.
* In the same way Jews of Greek-speaking Alexandria in Egypt authored the Septuagint, probably the Jews of Aramaic-speaking Damascus authored this Targum of Job. Their presence in Israel reflects the presence of Jews from such cities who immigrated to Israel, especially in connection with pilgrimages to Jerusalem and commerce.
* The general absence of Aramaic Targums in the Qumran Scrolls indicates the Qumran community spoke about Tora primarily in Hebrew and suggests Hebrew serving as a spoken language.
* The presence of only an Aramaic Targum for Job indicates Aramaic as a secondary language, confirms Hebrew as a primary language, and warns scholars against equating the presence of a Targum (even a whole Aramaic Bible) as the absence of Hebrew.
* Buth notes, "The surprise at Qumran is that while many Greek Bible texts were found (thus Qumran not being anti-translation, per se), many Aramaic documents (thus not being anti-Aramaic either), and with two copies of the famous targum Job (thus not being anti-targum), they simply don't have an Aramaic Bible in their library."
* The Qumran community was Hebrew.
* Besides the singular presence of Job, there is zero evidence for any Aramaic Bibles in Israel during the Early Roman Period.
* Not one 1st-century source (such as, Josephus, Philo, and the New Testament) mentions the practice of reading from a Targum in the synagogue. The custom did not exist at this time because the Hebrew-speaking communities seem to have understood the Hebrew Bible.
* Evidence for Aramaic Bibles does not appear until the Late Roman Period in the 2nd and 3rd centuries in the catastrophic aftermath of the Bar Kokhba Revolt and its Roman policies of massive population transfers to ethnically cleanse Judea of Jews.
* Safrai suggests Targums may have begun to be read in synagogues in Israel as early as the 2nd-century CE among Aramaic-speaking communities, after the Bar Kokhba Revolt.
* It is problematic to use 2nd-, 3rd-, and 4th-century inscriptions to evidence the linguistic environments of 1st-century Israel.

Late Roman Period I

* Late Roman Period 70-135 CE
* Destruction of the Temple
* Hebrew was a local spoken language: dialects include Mishnaic Hebrew (Copper Scroll and the Bar Kokhba Letters).

Late Roman Period II

* Late Roman Period 135-220 CE
* Aftermath of the Bar Kokhba Revolt
* Hebrew was a local spoken language: dialects include Mishnaic Hebrew (Mishna).
* Jerusalem and surrounding areas in Judea become ethnically cleansed of Jews.
* Survivors join Jewish communities in Galilee.

Mishnaic Hebrew

* "Mishnaic Hebrew, the language of the Mishnah, which was compiled around 200 CE in Galilee, displays distinctive differences from the Qumran Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Late Biblical Hebrew written in Jerusalem, which is rooted in the southern regional dialect of Judahite Hebrew. Recent analysis indicates that Mishnaic Hebrew is (close to) the colloquial dialect spoken in Galilee in Roman Times. It has long been noticed that certain biblical texts (narratives, victory songs, and so on) that stem from (ancient) northern Israel, such as the Song of Deborah (Judges 5) and the Gideon cycle (Judges 6-8), display different grammatical usages from Biblical and Judahite Hebrew. Close linguistic analysis indicates that Mishnaic Hebrew shares many of the distinctive linguistic properties found in the Israeli Hebrew of those texts stemming from northern Israel. Despite the gap of textual evidence for nearly a millennium, from the biblical texts in Israeli Hebrew prior to 722 BCE to the Mishnah around 200 CE, a continuity of language use must be posited to account for the strikingly similar linguistic features. The implication is clear: despite the Assyrian conquest the Israeli Hebrew of popular songs and stories such as the Song of Deborah and the Elijah-Elisha cycle continued to be used by the descendants of northern Israelites in Galilee during the intervening centuries, such that mishnnaic materials and even rabbinic language patterns are rooted in the same northern Hebrew dialect." - Richard A. Horsley, Galilee: History, Politics, People (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International 1995), p. 291, ISBN 1-56338-133-8.

Late Roman Period III

* Late Roman Period 220-330 CE
* Hebrew as a spoken language declines
* During this period, Hebrew becomes negligible as a local spoken language around 300 CE plus or minus 50 years, resulting from the aftermath of the catastrophic Bar Kokhba Revolt of the Late Roman Period II.
* Hebrew survives as a written language: dialects include Amoraic Hebrew (Talmud).
* Aramaic becomes the local spoken language.

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