Diachronic Diversity in Classical Biblical Hebrew

I just saw that Aaron Hornkohl has published an open-access book on Diachronic Diversity in Classical Biblical Hebrew, where he argues that we can see diachronic indications even within the corpus of Classical Biblical Hebrew. He suggests that, on balance, the Pentateuch reflects an earlier stage of Hebrew than the early prophets et al.

Rezetko et al. have published a critical review of the book, where they repeat their criticism of "linguistic dating" as unwarranted, given the complex formation and transmission histories of the texts. In the comments, Ron Hendel provides his own response to the review, which is generally supportive of Hornkohl's approach (if not all of the details of his argument).

I would not claim to be a historical linguist, and I haven't spent a lot of time in the literature. But I guess as a textual critic I have some stake in the argument. I agree, in principle, that it is not safe to just uncritically assume the MT text form for linguistic analysis. Scribes sometimes did update orthography or other linguistic features, and critical comparison of different versions sometimes helps us to restore earlier states of the text. That said, it would be wrong to imagine that updating on the scale of the (in)famous 1QIsa-a was common, when it is rather the exception to the rule. I see very little evidence of any kind of systematic linguistic leveling or updating in the tradition. Most ancient biblical manuscripts are much more conservative in their copying approach, and in general I have been impressed by the way the distinctive linguistic profiles of different works are so well preserved despite many centuries of copying. This is evident in orthography, morphology, lexicon (including loanwords), and even syntax. And bringing in traditions like the Dead Sea Scrolls and Samaritan Pentateuch is unlikely to change much, since these are precisely where we find most of the linguistic innovations, in contrast to the generally more conservative MT. My prediction is that systematic text-critical work will help reverse some linguistic changes and provide improved clarity at points, but that improved resolution will more often reinforce the more established diachronic observations of language typologists than undermine the typological distinctions.

On the question of redaction, no one doubts that many of the texts of the Hebrew Bible had long and complex editorial (pre-)histories. But there are many disagreements and uncertainties on the details of those histories, and I, for one, am hesitant to rely on proposed redactional histories as firm ground truths for dating the texts of the Hebrew Bible. If faced with a choice, I would personally much rather bring historical linguistic typology to bear as an independent control on redaction-critical models than the reverse. Linguistic typology is less dependent upon complex and subjective literary readings, and it is more easily pegged to materially datable evidence in the form of ancient inscriptions and comparative evidence. Of course, this is not to discount dating based on literary criteria entirely, and sometimes internal indications of date may be the best criteria. But too much of the tradition of dating the biblical books has been based on highly ambiguous literary data and is heavily dependent on very speculative redaction-critical theories. So I welcome attempts like Hornkohl's to provide more objective controls on literary-critical speculation. Whether the details of Hornkohl's particular arguments hold up or not remains to be seen.

HT Agade