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became more popular among the Jews until it displaced Hebrew as the dominant
language of Judaism in the Christian era. There is evidence that the Old Testament text
was revised again at that time.
After the Greeks came to power under Alexander the Great, the preservation of
Hebrew became a political issue; the conservative Jewish parties wanted to retain it. But
the Jews of the
Diaspora-
those living outside of Palestine-depended upon versions of the
biblical text in Aramaic (called the
Targums)
or Greek (called the
Septuagint).
Both the Targums and Septuagint were translated from Hebrew manuscripts. There
were substantial differences between these versions, and the Jewish rabbis went to great
efforts to explain these differences.
After Jerusalem fell to the armies of the Roman general Titus, Jewish biblical
scholars were scattered throughout the ancient world and the knowledge of Hebrew
began to decline. From A.D. 200 to nearly A.D. 900, groups of scholars attempted to
devise systems of vowel markings (later called
points)
to aid Jewish readers who no
longer spoke Hebrew. The scholars who did this work are called
Masoretes,
and their
markings are called the
Masora.
The Masoretic text that they produced represents the
consonants
that had been preserved from about 100 B.C. (as proven by the Dead Sea
scrolls); but the vowel
markings
reflect the understanding of the Hebrew language in
about A.D. 300. The Masoretic text dominated Old Testament studies in the Middle
Ages, and it has served as the basis for virtually all printed versions of the Hebrew Bible.
Unfortunately, we have no complete text of the Hebrew Bible older than the tenth
century A.D. The earliest complete segment of the Old Testament (the Prophets) is a
copy dating from A.D. 895. While the Dead Sea scrolls yield entire books such as Isaiah,
they do not contain a complete copy of the Old Testament text. Therefore, we must still
depend upon the long tradition of Hebrew scholarship used in the printed editions of the
Hebrew Bible.
The first complete printed edition of the Hebrew Bible was prepared by Felix
Pratensis and published by Daniel Bomberg in Venice in 1516. A more extensive edition
of the Hebrew Bible was edited by the Jewish-Christian scholar Jacob teen Chayyim in
1524. Some scholars continue to use the teen Chayyim text as the basic printed Hebrew
Bible.
D. The Hebrew of the Old Testament.
The Hebrew of the Old Testament does not
have one neat and concise structure; the Old Testament was written over such a long span
of time that we cannot expect to have one uniform linguistic tradition. In fact, the Hebrew
of the three major sections of the Old Testament varies considerably. These three sections
are known as the
Torah
(The Law),
Nebi’im
(The Prophets), and
Ketubim (The
Writings).
In addition to the linguistic differences between the major sections, certain books of the
Old Testament have their own peculiarities. For example, Job and Psalms have very
ancient words and phrases similar to Ugaritic; Ruth preserves some archaic forms of
Moabite speech; and First and Second Samuel reveal the rough, warlike nature of the
colloquial idiom of the era of Solomon and David.
As Israel changed from being a confederation of tribes to a dynastic kingdom, the
language changed from the speech of herdsmen and caravan traders to the literary
language of a settled population. While the books of the New Testament reflect a Greek
dialect as it was used over a span of about 75 years, the Old Testament draws upon
various forms of the Hebrew language as it evolved over nearly 2,000 years. Therefore,