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48 WRITING THE OLD TESTAMENT Old Testament cover the period ca. 1400 to ca. 500 B.C.E., from Moses to Queen Esther of Persia. There is not much difference between the language of the earliest books and that of the latest ones. This indicates that most of the original form of the Old Testament is lost to us. The Song of Solomon, for instance, contains vocabulary dating it to the Babylonian captivity five hundred years after Solomon’s reign. The oldest Hebrew is found in the Song of Moses (Exodus 15), the Song of Deborah (Judges 5), the Blessings of Jacob (Genesis 49), the Blessings of Moses (Deuteronomy 33), the Oracles of Baarlam (Numbers 23-4), the Poem of Moses (Deuteronomy 32), and Psalm 68. They include different terms from later Hebrew, for example words for prince, gold, listen, know, be, man, judge, see, do/make, wine, strike, and become angry. All these older passages constitute poems and songs and are easier to memorize than prose. 4 One major problem facing the Jews after Ezra produced the Old Testament was that Hebrew had given way to Aramaic, but the language of education was Greek. Ca. 250 B.C.E. the first books of the Old Testament were translated into Greek, followed by the remaining books over the next century. This Greek Old Testament text was known as the Septuagint from the Latin word for seventy, a reference to the alleged number of translators who prepared it for Greek-speaking Jewish communities, particularly those in Egypt. When the Christian church made translations into Ge’ez, Latin, Armenian, and other languages for their Bible, they worked from the Greek Septuagint because the Hebrew text still remained without vowels. Flavius Josephus, writing ca. A.D. 93, stated that the Jerusalem Jews maintained a standard reference copy of the Hebrew Old Testament. Unfortunately it has not survived. As mentioned earlier, some Hebrew texts were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls dating from ca. 200 B.C.E. but nothing else has survived between then and A.D. 600 when the Masoretes were engaged in their final redaction of the definitive Old Testament text. The Galilean and Babylonian Masoretes kept notes of their work. When there was a dispute they would write: “We in Babylon think this but those in Galilee think that.” Although they had been trained to memorize the missing vowel sounds, they did not always understand what they read. In the final version of the Old Testament there are about 350 places where they admitted they could come to no agreement about the meaning of the text. The Masoretes faced many problems in vocalizing the texts. They had been trained for hundreds of years to memorize the missing vowel sounds but this did not mean they always understood what they recited. Take for
QUEEN OF SHEBA AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 49 example passages in the Old Testament concerning the prophet Elijah. The Masoretes decided that Elijah was fed in the desert by ravens, not a very convincing scenario in a location where a raven would be hard pressed to care for itself and its own, let alone some peripatetic ecclesiastical eccentric. The word ravens is a translation of orbm. The original Hebrew text actually stated rbm and the Masoretes decided to place an o in front of it. However, it is more probable that they should have placed an a instead, so that the word would have read arbm, meaning that Elijah was sustained by Arabs not ravens. Perhaps the Masoretes could not accept that the Old Testament may have taken place in Arabia not Palestine, hence their refusal to write Arabs. Theology also influenced the vocalization. The original unvocalized Hebrew text seems to have stated that the gods, not God, ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. When Isaac asked the whereabouts of the sacrificial ram, Abraham told him the One True God would provide. Since the Masoretes refused to accept the idea of more than one God they changed their vocalization accordingly, making it seem that God ordered human sacrifice but then provided a ram. Hebrew, like other Semitic languages, is typified by a stem modified verbal system based on a single root word, for example DBR and ŠBR. In Biblical Hebrew the letters DBR can take different meanings, depending on the vowels. DiBeR means he spoke, while DeBaR means the word of. In the case of ŠBR, ŠaBaR means he broke, ŠiBBeR-he broke to pieces, niŠBaR - he was stranded. This modified verbal system, which spaces the root letters in different places to change meaning, is difficult enough for non-native speakers to interpret with a living language; it is even more so when dealing with an extinct tongue that lacks vowels. The Masoretes may have claimed a traditional knowledge of the correct vowels, but modern research has concluded that they relied more on Aramaic pronunciation than on ancient knowledge of the true values. Similar vowel sounds could be interpreted different ways. One sound could mean either to him or not. Vocabulary also changes. For example, in English the word treacle once meant “a wild animal,” and villain referred to a farm worker, while the Biblical Hebrew word for destroy means repair in modern Hebrew. Semitic languages like Hebrew experience a process called metathesis whereby two sounds or letters in a word change places. 5 An English example would be the change from the Old English ðridda to Modern English third. In the Old Testament Book of Psalms an example of metathesis occurs where qrbm (their inward thoughts) has come to mean
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MAP 8 Arabic Dialects of Western Ar
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Sheba

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