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46 WRITING THE OLD TESTAMENT open to everyone without intercession of the priesthood. A similar challenge to the priesthood had taken place within Christendom, when the Gnostics, drawing much support from financially independent Roman women, had been brutally crushed by the established church and their sacred texts proscribed. One major task facing the Rabbinical school of thought was to standardize the Old Testament using old Hebrew texts. As mentioned earlier, we have no idea which language Moses spoke when he gave the Hebrews the Torah. The Old Testament hints that it may have been an early form of Aramaic. But it is pertinent to note that the Beta Israel, the socalled Black Jews of Ethiopia, as late as the nineteenth century A.D. retained ancient Judaic liturgy in Qwarenya, 2 their Cushitic Agaw language, which they uttered but no longer understood, 3 because most had adopted Amharic, a Semitic language. When Joshua led the Hebrew into the Promised Land (ca. 1400 B.C.E.) they adopted Canaanite and developed a dialect that they called Ibrit (brt) after themselves (‘br). Modern Hebrew is called Ivrit. Only Joshua and Caleb survived the entire Exodus from Egyptian captivity until the conquest of the Promised Land. If the Torah had been memorized or written down, it would have been lost when the language changed to Canaanite. Hardly anything is known about the way Hebrew/Canaanite was spoken or written around 1000 B.C.E. when King Solomon established his Israelite kingdom as a major power in the Middle East; but within three hundred years it was being challenged by Aramaic and was fatally wounded when Judah fell in 586 B.C.E. The Samaritans from the northern kingdom of Israel retained a different writing system from those in Judah. The kingdom of Judah adopted a squarish version of the Aramaic alphabet very similar to that used by the Moabites. Hebrew died out around 400 B.C.E. Jews in the Middle East spoke Aramaic until it was replaced by Arabic after the seventh century. In Europe they developed dialects based on Hebraic-Aramaic mixes with local languages, most notably Yiddish from German and Ladino from Spanish. The Jewish scholars who undertook the definitive editing of the Old Testament were known as the Masoretes and were based in academies in Tiberias (Galilee), Sura, and Nehardea (Babylon). Their mother tongues were Aramaic and Arabic. By the time they completed their work, ca. A.D. 900, Hebrew had been dead for 1300 years, and most of their writings discussing their editorial work was in Arabic.
QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 47 There is no doubting the sincerity of the Masoretes. They gathered the most prestigious texts of the Old Testament and set out to determine which were authentic. Naturally there had been some deviations over the years as scribes occasionally miscopied from older texts. Despite this the deviations were not serious, and the texts available to the Masoretes were fairly uniform. Recently texts dating back to ca. 200 B.C.E. have been discovered, and they are very close to those the Masoretes must have used to produce the definitive version of the Old Testament. Nevertheless, the major problem facing the Masoretes was that none of the texts they consulted contained any vowels. The Hebrew originally wrote their sacred texts using only consonants. Vowels were omitted as vowel sounds were considered to be heavenly and therefore, like the image of God, too sacred to portray with the human hand. The sacred texts were written on leather scrolls, and the priests were trained to memorize the absent vowels as they read the texts. This might have proven an effective method if language never changed. This, of course, was not the case. By the time Masoretic scholars finally inserted what they believed to be the correct vowels the Hebrew language had not only changed considerably, it was also long dead. Different languages use consonants and vowels in different proportions, but the ratio is usually two consonants to a vowel. English, like Hebrew, uses more consonants than vowels. This means that if you spell a word in English omitting the vowels it will be easier to understand than a word that omits the consonants. For example if you take a place name in America and spell it only with the vowels, AIO, it would be extremely difficult to identify the full word; but if you spell it only with consonants, WSHNGTN, most would recognize it as Washington. That does not look difficult, but it is an example taken from modern English. If we go back in time, most English speakers would find Chaucer’s spoken English of 600 years ago almost unintelligible and Bede’s written Anglo-Saxon of nearly 1300 years ago a complete mystery, especially so if it were written only in consonants. Here is an example from unvocalized Anglo-Saxon: fdr r Þ rt n hfnm. Even if you were told that Þ should be transcribed like th, few English speakers would recognize this phrase as the ancient way of saying “Our Father who is in heaven” although hfnm does look like heaven and rt as art, the archaic way of saying is. It is generally acknowledged that the Old Testament text without vowels was drawn up from other texts, some of which have been lost, ca. 500 B.C.E. during exile in Babylon. The historical events described in the
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MAP 8 Arabic Dialects of Western Ar
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Sheba

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