Behind Babel Episode 5 | BEYOND BABEL A New Immersive Dance Show by Keone & Mari Madrid

Keone & Mari Madrid: Behind Babel Episode 4 | BEYOND BABEL A New Immersive Dance Show 

EPISODE 4: Building the Theater 

[Beyond Babel: A Handbook for Biblical Hebrew and Related Languages. Editors John Kaltner & Steven L McKenzie. SBL Resources for Biblical Study 42. Society of Biblical Literature, Atlanta, USA.
  2002. Pages: xii + 241. ISBN: 1-58983-035-0. (thanks to Oxford Academic for publication details)] 


I am an armchair linguist, as can be seen in many of my other book reviews for Words Across Time.  I also profess to be a Christian, and as such I have a particular interest in the language of Scripture.  The Christian Bible is written in three languages:  Hebrew (the Old Testament), Greek (the New Testament), and a small amount of Aramaic (also known as Chaldean) which is sprinkled amid several books (mainly Daniel and Ezra) within the Old Testament.

One should note, however, that the Bible, like nearly every other book and document in history, was not written in a vacuum.  It is informed by, and reflects the influence of, countless cultural and linguistic influences.  This is especially true of the Old Testament, given that it was assembled (many Biblical scholars prefer the word “compiled”) over the course of centuries of unprecedented upheaval and socio-political shifts in the Near and Middle East and across North Africa.  It is therefore no surprise that many languages show up in Scripture, either directly or indirectly, above and beyond the aforementioned.

This volume is a tidy and exceedingly informative compilation of articles written by experts in specific Biblical-era languages.  Many of these languages have become either extinct or are only used in very restrictive liturgical settings (meaning that they are no longer used in secular discourse).  Messrs Kaltner and McKenzie have done an admirable job with this collection of monographs.  For this review I’ll mention a few specifics about the structure and content of the book followed by a couple of observations of my own.

The book contains ten chapters, each devoted to one or more related languages.   The bulk of these chapters – indeed, all but one of them – discuss languages that are currently classified by linguists as Semitic languages.  Some sources would call these languages Nilo-Hamitic or by other designations, but the reader of this review is likely to have heard “Semitic” used much more frequently.  There are a number of Semitic languages still in use today.  The largest in terms of native speakers is Arabic (by far!).  Hebrew is also a Semitic language, as are Amharic (one of the principal languages spoken in modern-day Ethiopia) and Maltese.  [Fun trivia fact:  Maltese is the only Semitic language to be written with the Latin alphabet and read left-to-right across the page.]

The language groupings in this book are, in order:  Akkadian; Ammonite, Edomite & Moabite; Arabic; Aramaic; Egyptian, Hebrew (Biblical and Epigraphic); Hebrew (Postbiblical); Hittite (the only non-Semitic language!); Phoenician; and Ugaritic.  With the exception of Biblical Hebrew (and to a lesser degree Aramaic), the articles on the languages focus on how elements of each language’s grammar, syntax, semantic breadth and pragmatic extent exerted influence on the authors of the Biblical books.  Each article is written by an expert in the specific language area.  The tenor of the writing varies quite a bit, from nearly plainspoken to extremely pedantic, so the reader may wish to brace themselves for quite a waterfront’s worth of writing styles.

The chronology covered by these languages spans from roughly the third millennium BCE to roughly 300 CE – quite a lot of time for languages to evolve and adapt.  Evolution of language was especially notable in this time period when the vast majority of users of the language were illiterate.  The written word often provides a conservatizing filter on language, slowing the degree to which its phonetic and grammatical patterns change.  An excellent example is provided by Greek, which has been a written language for at least four thousand years.  A modern Greek can still read the classical (Attican) forms with general comprehension.  From this volume, the language with the longest continual usage is Arabic, and again, a modern Arabic reader would have little trouble reading and understanding written Arabic even from pre-Qu’ranic times.

I loved this book.  It opened my eyes to the realms inhabited by lots of extinct languages that nevertheless live on through the Bible in ways great and small.  If you’ve ever been curious about what the writers in past millennia might have been up to, this book forms a good foundation from which to satisfy that curiosity.

Kevin Gillette

Words Across Time

18 May 2022

Behind Babel Episode 12 | BEYOND BABEL An Off-Broadway Show | Keone & Mari Madrid