Histoire de la langue Hebraique: Des origines a l'epoque de la Mishna.

• Author: Huehnergard, John
• Position: Book Review

Histoire de la Ian gue Hebraique: Des origines a l'epoque de la Mishna. By MIREILLE HADAS-LABEL, Collection de la Revue des Etudes juives, vol. 21. Louvain: PEETERS, 1995. Pp. 199.

First published in 1976, this book now enters its fourth edition, a fact that shows its continuing interest and usefulness. As the title indicates, it covers the history of Hebrew down to the Mishnaic form of the language. The first chapter situates Hebrew within the Semitic family, giving a brief review of the languages of the family and discussing their internal subgrouping (in the latter regard the book is out of date, referring to the classification of Hommel and Brockelmann of a century ago, and not to any of the considerable recent discussion). Chapter II, "Ecriture et phonologie," begins with a detailed and accurate review of the history of the alphabet (including an interesting potpourri of digressions, such as a review of early Hebrew inscriptions and the transmission of the alphabet to the Greeks). The discussion of the order of the letters does not mention the so-called "South Semitic order" known from Ethiopic and Old South Arabian and now also known to have existed at Ugarit alongside the order familiar from Hebrew and Aramaic. The consonants are related to their earlier Semitic ancestors and compared with their cognates in other Semitic languages. (The chart on pp. 45-46 unhappily has a few errors, the most serious being the "South Arabian" reflexes of Common Semitic, s, s, and g, which should be, respectively, s or [s.sub.3], s or [s.sub.2], and g.) The section on the vowels mentions not only the other early pointing systems (Babylonian and Palestinian, besides Tiberian), but also Greek and Latin sources of information about the early vocalism of Hebrew.

Chapter III, devoted to Biblical Hebrew, begins with a brief history of the transmission of the text of the Hebrew Bible. Thereafter, "Archaic Hebrew" is introduced with a good review of the importance of the Canaanitisms in the Amarna letters (it is unfortunate that the bibliography was not updated to include W L. Moran's translation of these texts, available in French in 1987). The features of the Hebrew of the earliest Biblical poetry are then set out, followed by a long presentation of the features of the standard pre-exilic Hebrew, covering such diverse topics as vocabulary, parallelism, dialects, loanwords, comparative grammar, and a precis of the morphology. A shorter section is given over...