Full Text for Exodus- Volume 14 - Did Abraham and Moses speak Hebrew? If so, is it the same Hebrew spoken today? (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #14 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Okay. I'm going to ask a question that may show my ignorance. But I've often wondered: Did Abraham and Moses speak Hebrew? If so, is it the same Hebrew spoken today? >> Well, that's not a question that illustrates ignorance at all. It's actually a very intelligent question. In a sense, yes, they did speak Hebrew. And in another sense, no, they didn't. What they spoke was a language that would have been I guess we might describe the ancestor of the Hebrew of the Bible and of modern Hebrew. Now, modern Hebrew has changed a bit even from the Hebrew of the Bible. So the language that Abraham would have spoken would have been an earlier ancestor. And the language Moses would have spoken would have been fairly close to the Hebrew that's recorded in the Hebrew Old Testament. Although, it would have been written with a different script, with a different type face. To understand the languages of the Bible, we probably should talk just a little bit about the languages of the ancient world in general. From the Old Testament perspective we tend to group the languages of the ancient world into two big groups: Those that we call Semitic and those that we call non-Semitic. Obviously what the non-Semitic languages have in common is that they are not Semitic. So the reason for that are the ones that we really care about, the ones we're most interested in from an Old Testament perspective are the Semitic languages. Keeping in mind, of course, that ultimately all languages are mixed. There are elements, you know, that occur in common languages even though those languages are not necessarily directly related. We tend to describe languages as falling into families, which means that they share a common set of characteristics with one another. So maybe the thing for us to spend just a moment on is to talk about Semitic languages in terms of the common things that they have that make them a member of the same language family. Well, one of the things that characterizes Semitic languages are the way that words are formed. Now, this doesn't seem so natural to us because our words in English are not formed on any particular pattern the way that they are in Hebrew. So this is a foreign kind of concept for us. But it's one that's very characteristic of Semitic languages. In Semitic languages, the vast majority of words are based on three consonants. That is to say they are combinations of three consonants. And the vowels may change. But the three consonants remain the same all the time. And we call these groups of three consonants that words are related around, we call those roots in Hebrew. Maybe the easiest way to see this is to give you an example that comes from both Hebrew and from other languages. And you can see how these words are related. Let's take a common Hebrew word. The word for king. The Hebrew word for king -- and I'll transliterate it into English for you -- is melek. We might spell that in English m e l e k. Melek. Melek, the word for king, is based on these three consonants, MLK. And these consonants are always used for words that have to do with ruling and nouns like kings that embody or incapsulate rulers. So the noun for king in Hebrew is melek, as we've said. The verb, to be king or to rule, is malak. We would maybe transliterate that m a l a k. Malak. So melek is a king. Malak is to rule. Let's look at some other languages outside of Hebrew. For example, Akkadian or old Babylonian or old Assyrian has the same word or same root in it. So the word for a prince or a ruler in Akkadian is m a l k u, malku. In this case the U on the end is a nominative case ending. One of the distinctive features of Hebrew, at least by biblical Hebrew times, is that it has lost its case endings. And here is one place where Abraham's language may have differed from that of the Old Testament. We don't know exactly when the case endings were lost in Hebrew. So it may have been the case that around Abraham's time they still had case endings in Hebrew. And so the Hebrew word melek may have had a U on the end in Abraham's time. Just as in English we used to have case endings. But those case endings have fallen away. And they hardly ever show up anymore. We have a remnant of case endings in something like putting apostrophe S on the end of the word to make it possessive. So we say the dog's house. That's a remnant of a case ending type idea. And biblical Hebrew has lost its case endings. But they occur in some other Semitic languages. Another language that's closely related to Hebrew because it's a Canaanite dialect is the language of Ugarit. Ugarit is a city up the coast from Israel a couple of hundred miles. And in Ugarit they have the same three-letter grouping for this idea, MLK. The problem in Ugarit is they didn't spell things with vowels. And so we don't know exactly how the word was pronounced. But the noun that's simply written MLK means king. And the noun written with a T on the end, MLKT, is the feminine version of the noun meaning queen in Ugaritic. And in Aramaic there we get a word like Akkadian, malku, meaning a kingdom or a reign. We have a similar word in Hebrew, malkuth, m a l k u t h. In Hebrew, malkuth, meaning a kingdom or a reign. So you can see all of the Semitic languages share this common idea of building nouns and verbs most of the time around words that we call roots that are based on three letters. So that's a common characteristic of Semitic languages. Another common characteristic that's related to this is that the vocabulary of these languages is very, very similar. Since they are -- they are all building their words based on the same three-letter roots, the vocabulary words are always very close to one another. That's why in Hebrew, Akkadian, Ugaritic and Aramaic, if you learn the vocabulary for one of those, you've learned a big chunk of the vocabulary for others because they share the same body of words with slight variations in the way that they are formed. But another major difference between our languages and Semitic languages is the way that the verbs are formed. In our languages we usually form verbs based on the idea of time. We call them tenses. We talk about our verbs have a past tense. They talk about things that happened in the past. Or a future tense, talking about things that happen in the future. But Semitic languages do not have tense in the same way that modern English has tenses. They didn't talk about past events and future events in exactly the same way that we do. Now, there's a lot of debate with scholars about the exact nature of these forms of the Hebrew verb. And I won't bore you with those details. But I will bore you with these details: That verbs in Hebrew and other Semitic languages primarily deal not so much with time but with the state of an action. In other words, an action is either completed or incompleted or its in process. And so these verbs are more concerned not with time but with whether an action is ongoing or whether it's done or whether it is yet to be started. And so the Hebrew verbal system and Semitic language verbal systems in general are different. And that's one of the things that makes translating from these languages into modern languages a little bit of a challenge and a little bit interesting. Because they don't -- because the things that we call tenses don't always line up with the verbal forms in these languages consistently. And so you have to -- you know, you have to juggle them a bit. So the formation of words is in terms of verbal roots, the formation of vocabulary, you know, in the way that they share a common vocabulary and the structure of the verbal system, these are all ways in which Semitic languages differ from the languages that you and I speak today. Now, we also need to make one more distinction. That is between the language and the way that the language is written. That is to say the script or as we might say today -- in computerdom we might say the font that they used. And over history the scripts or the typefaces or the fonts that they used changed and developed, even though the underlying language stayed much the same. So Abraham would have been speaking an earlier form of the Semitic language that we call Hebrew. Which is really the same as Canaanite, to be honest. It's just a subdialect of Canaanite. Moses would have spoken a very similar language, which he no doubt would have learned and spoken and wrote the Old Testament in. David and Solomon and others later would have been speaking essentially the same language with some changes over time just as there have been changes in English over time. But it's recognizably the same language. So that once you learn Hebrew, if you look at inscriptions from a very early date, you have to learn the different typeface. But the language is very much the same. So yes, Abraham and Moses did speak Hebrew or at least an earlier form of Hebrew. And that gives us a great deal of confidence in the written word of God that they gave us as it has been preserved and transmitted to us faithfully by scribes and scholars from prophets down to the present day. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***