Historical Linguistics & Biblical Hebrew: Steps toward an Integrated Approach.

• Author: Bodine, Walter R.
• Position: Book review

Historical Linguistics & Biblical Hebrew: Steps toward an Integrated Approach. By ROBERT REZETKO and IAN YOUNG. Ancient Near East Monographs, vol. 9. Atlanta: SBL PRESS, 2014. Pp. xx + 699. $89.95 (paper).

This is a formidable book. It continues the authors' previous major effort to call for a fresh investigation of the dating of the original composition of the writings of the Hebrew Bible (Young, Retzetko, and Ehrensvard 2008). That two-volume work raised questions about the general consensus on this issue. The present volume continues to challenge that consensus from the perspective of historical/diachronic linguistics. The massive response to their earlier work (especially represented in print in the 2012 Diachrony in Biblical Hebrew [hereafter DBH]) indicates that it was taken seriously (see here pp. 2-3 and nn. 12-15 for a survey of the enormous response, including multiple conference sessions).

The present volume also deserves serious consideration. In it the authors have marshalled extensive historical linguistic evidence and presented it systematically. The focus of the book is on the inferior nature of the evidence in the Masoretic text (hereafter MT) for the reconstruction of the history of ancient Hebrew on the basis of current critical scholarship and textual criticism of these writings and on the use of historical linguistic methodology in such an undertaking. Their conclusion is already anticipated in the introduction, where they propose "a new perspective on the language of Biblical Hebrew (BH): not only is the linguistic dating of biblical writings unfeasible, but the distribution of linguistic data in the Masoretic Text (MT) of the Hebrew Bible suggests that EBH (Early Biblical Hebrew) and LBH (Late Biblical Hebrew) are better explained in general by a model of co-existing styles of literary Hebrew throughout the biblical period" (HLBH, p. 2).

In the first paragraph of their introduction the authors very briefly summarize the so-called "maximalist" and "minimalist" controversy that reached a high point in the 1990s (and has not subsided until today), but they make no further reference to it. One of them did edit a volume of studies (Young 2003) bringing together both perspectives, in which all three authors in their contributions to that volume already anticipated their parts in the 2008 publication and the viewpoint of the volume under review. The authors' claim is that the evidence we have in the MT does not support the widely held view of a periodization by which these books (or parts of them) can be segregated into early, middle, and late periods of ancient Hebrew language development. They find a consistency throughout the MT in what they term "Standard Classical Hebrew" and an inconsistency in what they term "Peripheral Classical Hebrew," with the consistency in the former and the inconsistency in the latter both supporting their argument.

In the introduction the authors summarize the background leading up to their...