Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/634

Rh 600 HEBREW the classical rajdela of the Old Testament, which neither famished the necessary terminology for the new ideas with which they operated, nor offered in its forms and construc tions a suitable vehicle for their favourite processes of legal dialectic. Thus was developed a new scholastic Hebrew, &quot; the language of the wise &quot; (D^DDPI jit??), preserving some genuine old Hebrew words which happen not to be in the Bible, and supplying some new necessities of expression by legitimate developments of germs that lay in the clas sical idiom, but thoroughly interpenetrated with foreign elements and as little fit for higher literary purposes as the Latin of the mediaeval schoolmen. The chief monument of thb dialect is the body of traditional law called the Mishna, which is formed of materials of various dates, but was collected in its present form about the close of the 2d Christian century. The doctors of the subsequent period still retained some fluency in the use of Hebrew, but the mass of their teaching preserved in the Gemara is Aramaic. 1 Ths language of the Mishna has been described by Geiger, Lehr- und Lcsebucli zur /SpracLe der Mischnah (Breslau, 1845); L. Dukes, Die Sprache der Mischna (Esslingen, 1846) and Zar rabbiuischen Sprackkunde (Vienna, 1851); J. H. Weiss, Miskpat L skon ham-Jfish?ia (Vienna, 1867). During the Talmudic period nothing was done for the grammatical study of the old language, but there was a traditional pronunciation for the synagogue, and a tradi tional interpretation of the sacred text. The earliest monu ment of Jewish interpretation is the Septuagint, but the final form of traditional exegesis is embodied in the Targums or Aramaic paraphrases, especially in the more literal Targums of Oakdos and Jonathan, which are often cited by the Talmudic doctors. Many things in the language of the Old Testament were already obscure, and the meaning of words was discussed in the schools, sometimes by the aid of legitimate analogies from living dialects, 2 but more often by fantastic etymological devices such as the Xotari- kou, or use of analogies from shorthand. The real service rendered to Hebrew philology by the Talmudic doctors consists not in what they produced but in the knowledge which they preserved from the time when the idiom of the Old Testament was a living tongue. The exaggerated value which their casuistic exegesis attached to every syllable and every letter of the sacred books re- salted in a finical preservation, not indeed of the original text, but of the text which had become authoritative, and which is hardly later than the 1st Christian century. And fortunately for later scholarship the period immediately sabsequent to the close of the Talmud (about 600 A.D.) tbvissd in the vowel points and accents a means for pre serving not merely the consonants of this text but the exact pronunciation and intonation of the synagogue. The idea of this system of punctuation appears to have been taken from a similar usige adopted in Syriac MSS.; the complete development of the idea as we find it in our present Hebrew Bibles must have been reached by successive steps which we cannot now trace. The current punctuation is the work of the Palestinian schools ; another system resting on the same foundations was developed in Babylon, and is known from the MSS. of the Petersburg library collected by Firkowitsch, and also from copies brought from Yemen. The difference between the two systems lies more in the notation than in the pronunciation, and neither punctuation can claim absolute priority. 3 The work of the punctuators 1 See Bacher, Die Ar/gada der Babylonischen Amoraer (Strasburg, 1379), for many illustrations of the Hebrew scholarship of the Gemar- ists. 8 See B. Rosh hash-Shana, 26b : Delitzsch on Ps. Iv. 23 and Isa. xir. 23. 3 The Babylonian punctuation can be best studied in Strack s fac simile (St Petersburg, 1876) of the St Petersburg codex of the prophets of 916 A.D. Notable in this system is the absence of a sign for seghol was perhaps completed in the 7th century. After a time the vowel signs came to be thought as old as the text, but a juster view was revived by Elias Levita (1472-1549), 4 and, after the great controversy in the 16th century between Cappellus and Buxtorf, finally gained universal recognition. 5 With the work of the punctuators is asso ciated the collection by the Massorets of a great mass of notes designed to preserve and illustrate by statistics excep tional phenomena of the Old Testament text, 6 a work which may be viewed as the first step towards scientific study of Hebrew philology. With all this the old traditional scholarship continued to decline till the 10th century, when a revival of Hebrew study under the influence of Mahometan learning took place among the Arabic-speaking Jews (Saadia of the Fayyum, Menahem ben Sarug, &c.).~ Then, early in the llth cen tury, came the acknowledged fathers of mediaeval Jewish philology, the grammarian Judah surnamed Hayyug, discoverer of the system of triliteral roots, 8 and the lexico grapher Abulwalid Merwan ibn Ganah (Rabbi Jonah), who made excellent use of Arabic analogies as well as of the traditional material. 9 A succession of able scholars con tinued their work, of whom the most famous are Abraham ben Meir of Toledo, surnamed Ibn Ezra (1092-1167), a man of great originality and freedom of view ; Solomon Isaaki of Troyes, called Ivashi and sometimes by error Jarchi, i.e., of Lunel (died 1105), whose writings are a storehouse of traditional lore ; and David Kimchi of Narbonne, called Radak (circ. 1200), whose commentaries, grammar, and lexicon exercised an enormous and lasting influence, and were the chief fountain of knowledge for the Christian Hebraists of the 16th century. Our own authorized version, for example, bears the stamp of Kimchi on every page. On the Jewish scholars and their works consult Wolf and Barto- locci, also De Uossi, Dizionario Storico dcgli Autori Ebrci, Parma, 1802 ; on Ibn Ezra in particular, the Introduction to Friedlander s translation of his Com. on Isaiah (London, 1873), and the same writer s Essays on the Writings of Ibn Ezra (London, 1877) ; on the French Kabbins, Histoirc Lit. de la France, vol. xvi., but espe cially vol. xxvii. (1877) ; on Rashi, Zunz s Gcsammcltc Schriftcn, iii. 100, and a biography by the same scholar, translated into Ger man by Bloch (1840). In the later Middle Ages Jewish learning was cramped by a narrow Talmndical orthodoxy ; but a succession of sound scholars held their ground till Elias Levita and others of his age transmitted the torch to the Christian universities. Up to the revival of letters there was no productive Hebrew scholarship among Christians. In the Greek and Latin Church the few fathers who, like Origen and Jerome, knew something of the language were wholly dependent on their Jewish teachers, and have value for us only as deposi taries of Hebrew tradition. Nor was it otherwise in the East. The Syriac version of the Old Testament is permeated (&amp;lt;?), which is replaced by i or a. See also Pinker s Einl. in d. Baby- lonisch-heb. Punctationssystem (Vienna, 1863), and for other litera ture, Wellhausen-Blcek, p. 614, to which add Derenbourg, Revue Critique, June 21, 1879. 4 See his Massoreth ham-Massorcth, re-edited by Dr Ginsburg, 1867. 6 The history of the controversy has been written by G. Schneder- niann, Die Controverse des Ludovicus Cappellus mil den Buxtorfen (Leipsic, 1879). 6 On the Massorah see especially Jacob b. Hayyim s preface to the Venice Rabbinical Bible (reprinted and translated by Dr Ginsburg, London, 1867), Levita s Massoreth ham- Massoreth, and Buxtorf s Tiberias (Basel, 1620). Besides the Massorah as printed by J. b. Hayyim in the Venice Bible, which is superior to all reprints, we have in print Ochlah w Ochlah (ed. Frensdorff, Hanover, 1864), and the first part of the Massorah Magna (ed. Frensdorff, 1876). A new edition of the Bible with Massorah, from an extensive collation of MSS., is now being printed at Vienna by Dr Ginsburg. 7 The connecting link between the Massorets and the grammarians is Rabbi Aaron ben Mosheh ben Asher, whose Dil-duke hat-T amim has been published by Baer and Strack (Leips. 1879). 8 See his Two Treatises, edited by Nntt, London, 1870. 9 His Book of Roots, in Arabic, edited by Neubauer, Oxford, 1875