Studies in Mishnaic Hebrew

and Related Fields

Proceedings of the Yale Symposium
on Mishnaic Hebrew, May 2014

Editors

Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal and Aaron J. Koller

The Program in Judaic Studies The Ben-Yehuda Center

Yale University for the History of the Hebrew Language
New Haven The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
 Copyeditor: Shirley Zauer
Indexes: Adam Parker

ISBN 978-965-481-067-8

Distribution: Magnes Press

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Computer Typesetting: Judith Sternberg

Production: The Academy of the Hebrew Language

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 Contents

Introduction VII

Chanan Ariel Deviations from Mishnaic Hebrew

Syntax in Mishneh Torah Due to the

Intentional Usage? 1

Moshe Bar-Asher Problems in the Description of the

Morphology of Mishnaic Hebrew 37

Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Towards a Reconsideration of the

Siegal Tense-Aspect-Mood System of Tannaitic
Hebrew 59

Gabriel Birnbaum Phonological and Morphological Studies

in MS Antonin 262 (Mishnah Seder
Teharoth) 93

Steven E. Fassberg
in Light of Other Judean Desert
Documents 113

Steven D. Fraade The Innovation of Nominalized Verbs

in Mishnaic Hebrew as Marking an
Innovation of Concept 129
Aaron Koller The Social and Geographic Origins of
Mishnaic Hebrew 149
Aharon Maman Rabbinic Hebrew in the Eyes of
Medieval Hebrew Philologists 175
Emmanuel Mastey Cases of Semantic Variation in Mishnaic
Hebrew: The Verbs and 189
Michael Ryzhik The Language of the Mishnah from the
Late Manuscripts to the Printed Editions 221
Bernard Septimus The Face of Shame: Between Palestinian
Blushing and Babylonian Blanching 241
Rivka Shemesh- Towards a Description of Halakhic Give-
Raiskin and-Take Conversations in the Mishnah 265
Nurit Shoval-Dudai Identical Lemmata of Greek and Latin
Loanwords in the Historical Dictionary
of the Hebrew Language: Classes and
Criteria 293
Ruth Stern The Noun and Its Variant Forms in
Rabbinic Hebrew 337
Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra The Mishnah into French: Translation
Issues 349
Ofra Tirosh-Becker The Relative Pronoun Še- in Rabbinic
369
The Relation between Maimonides and
the Yemenite Tradition in Mishnaic
Hebrew 395
Alexey (Eliyahu) qosin and qorpayot
Yuditsky 411

Indexes
Index of Primary Sources 425
Index of Subjects 434
Index of Modern Scholars 444
 The Social and Geographic Origins
of Mishnaic Hebrew

AA R ON KOL L E R
Yeshiva University

It is not possible to trace the rise and

development of [Mishnaic Hebrew],

1. Introduction
The question of the origin of Mishnaic Hebrew (=MH) and its exact
position within the dialects of Ancient Hebrew has been broached often
from various directions. No comprehensive statement regarding these
questions has commanded a broad consensus, and this may be because,
while all the pieces to the puzzle are well known, the solution itself
involves chronology, geography, and social history. In this paper, I will
begin with the key pieces to the puzzle, and then try to put these into some

dialect of Hebrew known to us from the Mishnah—MH—was the spoken

dialect in the Shephelah in the last centuries of the Second Temple era.2

1 Segal 1927:12.
2 The descriptive study of MH has been very thorough over the past few decades. The

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Following the catastrophe of Bar Koseba, this dialect began to serve as

the literary language of the Rabbis.
The blocks on which this conclusion will be built are: MH was a
spoken language; MH was not a direct descendant of Biblical Hebrew
(=BH); typologically and historically MH is a later dialect of BH; MH
was not the spoken dialect of Roman-era Judea. Following a review of
each of these points, we will turn to explanatory schemes proffered to
deal with these data, leading to a synthetic conclusion that builds on the
various parts of the paper.

2. The Fundamental Data

The question of MH as a spoken language has a well-known history. For

and onward have argued that MH was the descendant of a dialect of Hebrew
spoken during the Iron Age3 and that, especially since the discovery of the
Bar Koseba texts, this view has been the ascendant and dominant one.4 It
should be noted, however, that two types of evidence have been mustered
to support the view that MH was a colloquial dialect, and each suffers

a) Texts in Hebrew: the discovery and publication of the Bar Koseba texts
convinced many that Hebrew was still a spoken language.5 Milik earlier
reached this conclusion based on the Copper Scroll and other Second

best example of this type of descriptive work, see Bar-Asher 2015. Although we
now know that there were different traditions of MH from the times of the Tannaim
themselves, the data discussed here are found in all traditions of MH.
3 See the many references collected in Steiner 1992:21–26.
4 For one good discussion, see Fassberg 2012a, and for a recent survey with copious
bibliography, see Ong 2015:32–53.
5 This paper argues that the texts from Judah are not directly relevant to discussions
of MH in any event; see below.

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 The Social and Geographic Origins of Mishnaic Hebrew

Temple era texts.6

language is not potentially political rather than neutral. Of the Hebrew
documents from Wadi Murabba‘at, for example, nearly all are from the
years of either the Great Revolt or Bar Koseba’s revolt. The one exception,
which is earlier, is dated not according to any king but according to the
reign of the High Priest, a transparently nationalistic act.
The use of Hebrew in these texts, then, seems to be politically motivated
in all cases.7 With regard to the Bar Koseba texts, Yadin suggested that

of the leader.8 From an earlier time, Schwartz noted that the Hasmoneans
9
This goes hand-
in-hand with the occasional use of paleo-Hebrew script, both having
served as archaizing statements of nationalistic self-determination. In the
absence of “neutral” texts, whose language choices are not driven by
political motivations, it is impossible to be sure that Hebrew was in fact
a naturally spoken language.
b) Internal structural evidence: the bulk of M. H. Segal’s arguments for
MH being a spoken dialect are internal arguments from the structure of
the language.10 For example, he argues correctly that the 1cp pronoun
must have been a colloquial form already in biblical times: it appears only
once in the text of the Bible, as a form in Jer 42:6, “corrected” by the
qere tradition to . The form is one of a number of forms that are

turn of the eras, and these are commonly, and convincingly, explained as
evidence for a spoken dialect which is seen more fully in later texts.11

6 Milik 1957:88–91 = Milik 1959:130–33.

7 Cotton 1999; Eshel 2002:160; Schwartz 2005:77.
8 Yadin 1971:181, quoted with approval in Cotton 1999:221.
9 Schwartz 1995:26–27; Schwartz 2005:76–77.
10 Segal 1908. On Segal in the context of the history of the study of MH, see Kessler-
Mesguich 2003:142–43.
11 See, for instance, Morag 1974:315, n. 48; Bar-Asher 1977; Bar-Asher 1985:93–94;
Steiner 1992:18.

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This type of argument can only establish, however, that MH was a

spoken dialect at some time and in some place; it cannot be shown that
it was spoken in late-second/early third-century Roman Palestine.12 The
dialect may have been spoken, for example, centuries earlier, and been a
frozen literary dialect by the time the Mishnah was composed.
There is, however, still good reason to think that even if we cannot show
that MH was not actively spoken at the height of the Tannaitic era—and
indeed, even if MH was not actively spoken at the height of the Tannaitic
era—it is still very important to start with the point that MH was a spoken

people to speak it even if they wanted to;13

language of even the Tannaim themselves;14 and this may not explain
why the Mishnah was composed in that dialect.15 From the perspective of

hypothesis that takes MH to be a purely scholastic invention.

The second major point, again well known, is that MH is not a direct
descendant of BH.16 The best proof of this is that MH sometimes preserves

12 Alexander 1999:74–75, after citing Segal, concludes that Hebrew was declining by
the beginning of the second century CE, and then received a death blow from the Bar
Koseba catastrophe.
13
paper in this volume, with references to earlier literature.
14 See Sifre Deuteronomy §46 (Finkelstein 1969:104):
“When the baby begins to speak, his father (sic) speaks
with him (sic) in the holy language and teaches him Torah.” This text takes for
granted that the baby would “begin to speak” in a language other than Hebrew,

be with someone other than the father—presumably the mother. Of course, this is not
an ethnological report, but the reality presupposed here seems to be quite realistic.
15 For a political reading of why the Mishnah is in Hebrew, see, for instance, Schwartz
1995; Schwartz 2005.
16 For this, see Bar-Asher 2009:1.117–21; Bar-Asher 2014:234–36, 268.

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point.17
a) The feminine singular demonstrative pronoun is attested a number of
times in the Bible, spelled either (Hosea 7:16) or (2 Kgs 6:19). Some
have suggested that this form was especially preserved in the northern
dialect of Hebrew.18 In any event, it appears also in Ezekiel 40:45 and
six times in Qohelet,19 as well (perhaps) as in Lachish 6:2, , in
which may be vocalized . This led Kutscher to suggest that the
20

form gradually spread southward until it supplanted .21 Hurvitz, too,

mentioned this as one of the examples of an older form generally not
commonly attested in the Bible, but clearly preserved in the vernacular,
as seen by the fact that it reappears and becomes the dominant form in
MH.22 Both internal reconstruction and comparative evidence show that
, from , was the earlier form and the addition of the /t/ was a redundant
feminine marker for transparency. Thus, MH preserves the older form.
b) The relative particle , aberrant in Standard BH (although common in
Qohelet and Shir ha-Shirim), is ubiquitous in MH.23
years ago, Segal provided a succinct account of the history of within
Hebrew:

17 See the comments of Bar-Asher Siegal 2015.

18 Burney 1918:208; Kutscher 1982:31 (§44).
19 Qoh 2:2, 24; 5:15, 18; 7:23; 9:13.
20 Note the occurrences in Lachish of the spelling of - , e.g., , “his servant” (2:5);
“took him
with in the Bible.
21 See also Rendsburg 1990:89; Davila 1990:83, n. 69 regarding the interpretation of
Ps 132:12. See also Fredericks 1996:16.
22 Hurvitz 1972:42.
23 There is an old debate about the possible etymological relationship between and
. Two recent studies with full bibliographies stake out opposite sides of this
question: Huehnergard 2006 argues that derives from , while Holmstedt 2007
argues that there can be no etymological relationship. Supporting Huehnergard’s
view on syntactic grounds is Pat-El 2012.

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Now, whatever the relation of the two forms to each other, there
can be no doubt the is as old as
in the earlier books of the Bible to North Israelitish documents
would prove that its use must have been common in the colloquial
speech of Northern Palestine… The scarcity of its occurrence even
in these documents must be explained by the assumption that it was
regarded as a vulgarism which the literary language had to avoid.
Its use gradually extended to Southern Palestine, and being the
shorter and more pliable form, it must in the course of time have
entirely supplanted the longer in the language of the common
people, and from this it descended directly to MH.24
Segal’s view is compelling.25 Thus, the particle seems to have been
preserved within a dialect of ancient Hebrew other than standard literary
Iron Age Hebrew, and later used regularly in MH.26
c) The third person feminine singular perfect of in
BH, but in MH. Internal and typological reconstruction shows that
the Mishnaic form is the earlier one, since an original banayat ,27

either for grammatical transparency or on analogy to strong verbs

( : :: : ), or both. The form , apparently to be
vocalized
Jerusalem and sporadically in BH, as well (Exod 5:16: ; Lev 25:21:
; Lev 26:34: ; 2 Kgs 9:37: , qere ; Jer 13:19:
; Ezek 24:12: ). Thus, here, there is clear
evidence that the form existed during the Iron Age in some Hebrew
dialect(s), although it was not standard in BH. As Sarfatti concluded,
therefore, it is likely that this was a colloquial form during the Iron Age
which later was the standard form in MH.28

24 Segal 1927:43.
25 It is supported on other evidence by Levine 1985. See also Kutscher 1982:32 (§45).
26 It is often argued that it was a northern dialect of Hebrew that preserved the particle.
27 Harris 1939:58–59; Blau 1980:19; Blau 2010:250.
28 Sarfatti 1992:44–45.

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There are other phenomena that probably belong here as well, such as the

MH than in BH,29 MH nouns and , and perhaps others.30 But enough

has been said to justify the claim that MH is not a direct descendant of
BH but of some other Iron Age dialect(s) of Hebrew.

While features such as , , and suggest that MH descends from

some colloquial dialect from biblical times, it is also clear that in many
ways MH is helpfully seen as a later form of Hebrew than BH—in other
words, in many cases the best way of explaining the differences between
the two dialects actually is simple diachrony. Of course, between BH
and MH lie Late Biblical Hebrew, Qumran Hebrew (=QH), and Judean

are best set aside, although both clearly contain features later than
Standard BH31 as neither is easily situated on a linguistic continuum.32
The Hebrew of the Judean Desert texts, on the other hand, presents us
with as straightforward a dialect as we could hope for.
JDH is found in a relatively small number of texts, from a known

29 See the list of MH examples and discussion in Segal 1908:665–69. This example
is more complicated, both in terms of the data and in terms of the typological
implications. For the data, note the coins of a single ruler who ruled for three years.
30 and , as
opposed to BH and
perhaps, be older than the usual BH forms with fem[inine] terminations .” An

imperfects at a later stage in the language.

31
seen, see Koller 2012.
32 The literature on each is quite large. For an entry-point to Late BH with full
bibliography, see Hurvitz 2014. For an overview of the issues with regard to Qumran
Hebrew, see Bernstein & Koller 2012 and Fassberg 2012b, both with references to
earlier literature.

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 Aaron Koller

century. Moreover, these are not literary texts, so while there is some
amount of stylization and affectation to be expected in any written text,
and more so in legal texts, these are relatively close to snapshots of a
living language. Furthermore, because it appears that some or all of the
scribes who wrote these texts were not actually trained to write Hebrew,
but rather Aramaic, they mask less than scribes usually do.33 Thanks to
Uri Mor’s thorough description, we also have a full analysis of these
texts.34
Not surprisingly, JDH is often evidently later than BH, and often shows
agreement with MH. This is true in the realm of lexicon, including the
presentative particle and the borrowed word for the citron, ,
and also in the realm of grammar. To cite one example: the participle is
used for the immediate future in MH, such as
“a person stands… and says: ‘From here I will eat [lit. will eat]
4:7), and the same is found in JDH, such as
“that I will put the fetters on your feet!” (Murabba‘at 43:5).35
Other details of syntax also appear to be similar in MH and JDH.36

either
Despite the ways in which JDH seems to be a midpoint between BH and
MH, there are also features that show that MH could not have developed
from JDH.37
a) The morphosyntax of is more conservative in MH than in

33 For the masking that scribes usually do so well, see Steiner 1995:199–203.
34 Mor 2016; see his dissertation from which the data below is drawn: Mor 2009.
35 Mor 2013. For the development of this use of the participle in MH, see Steiner
1996a.
36 See Mor & Zewi 2015.
37 See Qimron 2000:235. A list of differences between MH and JDH can be found in
Knauf 2006:312; Mor 2009:288.

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JDH. As is known, BH was replaced by , and later

was reanalyzed as a single morpheme rather than two morphemes,
+ .38 In this regard, JDH is more progressive than MH. In MH, of
course, the reliable manuscripts still have attached to the following
word, with gemination in the initial consonant of the word.39 Even if
the attachment or detachment is merely a scribal issue, the presence of
gemination in MH, which is clearly absent in JDH, indicates that MH is
more conservative linguistically in this regard.
b) Similarly, but perhaps less convincingly, the morphosyntax of is

to the noun that is the direct object, with the resulting elision of the as
40
In MH, it was written as a separate word, as
in BH. Since this could conceivably be the result of later scribes41 writing

way it was actually pronounced, this may be relevant only to the history
of scribal practices and not the history of the language.
c) In the realm of morphology, verbs from roots with initial
sibilants in QH, none of the Yadin papyri, the Bar Koseba letters, and
Nabatean Aramaic show the expected metathesis.42
such as (P. Yadin 53:3), (P. Yadin 54:10), and others in the
Great Isaiah Scroll and Hodayot. There is an areal feature found in all of
the dialects from Judah and east to the other side of the Dead See in the

According to Fassberg, the form is explicable within Aramaic, and

43
But no such

38 For this latter process, see Steiner 1996b. For the data in JDH, see Mor 2009:
247–48.
39 Bar-Asher 2009:1.118.
40 For the examples, see Mor 2009:242–44.
41
42 See Folmer 2003:241; Koller 2011:203–04; Fassberg 2012c.
43 Fassberg 2012c:32.

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phenomenon is known from MH, where the metathesis familiar from BH

is the rule. Since it is not plausible that the forms went from metathesized
to unmetathesized and then back to metathesized within a single century,
this appears to be good evidence that MH preserves the older metathesized

rise to the unmetathesized forms in that corpus.44

unmetathesized forms are found in dialects on both sides of the Dead Sea.
MH, therefore, was spoken elsewhere in the second century CE.
d) Finally, MH contains many dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of Greek
loanwords.45 The Hebrew of the JDH texts contains only a few altogether
( , , , , ).46 Mor (p.c.) suggests that this may be
the result of an ideology of linguistic purism, presumably for nationalistic
reasons. However, there are Aramaic loanwords47
to accept that Bar Koseba’s military personnel would have been that
interested in the lexicon to consciously weed out whatever Greek loans
they may have known.
Instead, this appears to be a real dialectal difference; JDH contained
very few Greek loanwords, and MH contained many.48 Here geography
seems like an obvious explanation, and this provides the converse to the

44 It is possible that actually the non-metathesized examples represent the older form;
as Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal (p.c.) points out, this is the more natural explanation. If

conclusion that the dialects of the Judean Desert were shielded from the metathesis that
had taken place elsewhere in the Levant centuries earlier. Exceptional unmetathesized
forms are found earlier in Levantine Semitic:
and the like in BA (see the discussion in Qimron 1993:48–49).
45 See Heijmans 2013, as well as Shoval-Dudai’s paper in this volume.
46 Mor 2009:187–88.
47 Some of the more subtle examples are “purchase” (Mur 42); “contempt”
(Mur 42); “slaughter.”
48 Bar-Asher Siegal points out (p.c.) that the distribution of Greek loanwords in MH
is not evenly distributed throughout the corpus, and that given the very small size

distribution in MH is related to (a) the subject matter and (b) the rabbis being quoted

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 The Social and Geographic Origins of Mishnaic Hebrew

stronger and more prevalent in the coastal regions than JDH was.
e) Before leaving this section, it should be noted that there are also
features that divide MH from QH. As noted earlier, the status of QH is not
entirely clear. Qimron, who argues that it basically represents the spoken
language of Jerusalem in the last centuries BCE, notes the following
differences between QH and MH:
, whereas QH and other sources from Jerusalem use
.
; other sources use .
means “near,” and is followed by a GN, as in BH, and thus
the form is found; in MH, however, means “to,” is preceded
by a verb of motion, and is usually followed by a destination.
In sum, MH is a dialect whose origins cannot be seen in the dialects
known from earlier in Judea, despite our knowledge of JDH and QH.49
Thus, MH seems to have arisen elsewhere.50

(some have more loanwords in their dialects than others). But this requires further
study.
49

article in . According to Barag (92), this “is a case of haplography, as noted by

Chwolson long ago (1882).” Avigad 1954:61 also claims haplography and emends
to
is in Hebrew, rather than in Aramaic, but says nothing about the dialect of Hebrew
represented here.
50 It should be noted that within JDH there is at least one transition that presages

demonstrative pronoun is , as in BH, but by the time of Bar Koseba, the attested
form is . Since this is not a question of “progress,” but actually “regress,” or,
apparently, the adoption of a different dialect, this means that some other dialect
began to make incursions into Judea in the years after the destruction of the Second
Temple. See Mishor 2000–2001; Mor 2009:120–21.

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3. Explanatory Schemes
A number of different explanations have been offered for the phenomenon
of MH. Some of these aimed to explain only a single feature or constellation
of features, while others attempted more comprehensive explanations. A
number of the more prominent and powerful explanatory schemes will be

satisfactory account of the issue.

A number of scholars have looked to geographic factors to explain MH.

In particular, people have pointed to the northwest and west. Yehezkel

pointed to features that are

51

suggestive of a connection between MH and Phoenician: the word for

an oath, the form for “in the house,” found in Phoenician, QH,
and MH52 and the neutralization of the opposition between /m/ and /n/

and MH (as well as JDH, we may now add).53 Other features allegedly
suggestive of a relationship between Phoenician and MH are the noun
“laborer” and the noun “labor,” both ubiquitous in MH and
derived from the root , which is common in Phoenician, and the plural
construct form rather than “days of.” One may also consider

51 Kutscher 1969.
52 Steiner 2005:260–61. For a contrasting explanation of the phenomenon, see Mor
2014:222–24.
53 The plural ending /n/ may be found on a fourth-century BCE Hebrew ostracon from
Jerusalem; see Naveh 2000:9–10. The ostracon reads . Naveh
comments that is Hebrew, not Aramaic ( ), as is (against Aramaic or
; Aramaic means “talent” [weight]), and writes, “It seems likely that this
ostracon served as a label in a public (perhaps military) bakery, where Hebrew was
presumably the spoken language” (p. 10). But see Kottsieper 2007:112–13, who
denies that this ostracon is in Hebrew.

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 The Social and Geographic Origins of Mishnaic Hebrew

the syntax of phrases such as (Ter. 3:5) and ( . 6:6),54

article but the demonstrative pronoun does not.

As is evident, most of these features are poor grounds on which to
build a theory. Mor showed that there are few if any features that are
shared exclusively by Phoenician and MH; the features under discussion
are actually shared across numerous dialects and therefore show little
about a purported relationship between Phoenician and MH.55 The root
, although very common in Phoenician, is also used in BH, and in any
case is not a productive root in MH, but is only found in those two nouns.56
None of these features can bear the weight of a claim of real historical
connection. Still, they have to be part of a comprehensive picture of the
origins of MH.

In a number of publications, Gary Rendsburg proposed that MH is simply

the descendant of Iron Age Northern Hebrew.57 While some of the data
reviewed above, such as the relative particle and the feminine singular
demonstrative pronoun , are suggestive of such a connection, they are
both attested in southern texts, at least from the period of the Babylonian

between Northern Hebrew and MH are either not demonstrably northern

or are not really comparable.58 It is also historically implausible that

54 These examples are collected by Segal 1908:669, without, however, the comparison
to Phoenician.
55 Mor 2014:231–32.
56 For earlier attestations, see Porten & Yardeni 2006 on the ostraca that refer to hiring
.
57 See, especially, Rendsburg 1992, 2003.
58
published by Talshir 2003:270–75. My own views on some of the features differ
somewhat, but not with any implications for the issue under discussion.

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Roman times to have enabled this dialect to survive,59 although it must be

conceded that small populations can be quite tenacious with regard to the
preservation of their native tongue.

koiné in the Shephelah

A bolder variation on the above hypotheses was the hypothesis of Milik
that there was “une sorte de koinè” formed at the beginning of the Persian
period, and spoken in the Shephelah, from which MH later descended.60
As Mor pointed out, however, there is not nearly enough evidence to
support such a claim (although I will return to a weaker version of such
a hypothesis below). Mor himself suggested that similarities were due
to “as a more simple case of language contact between Phoenicians and
Jews,” and that “it seems plausible that this contact was rather limited.”61

+ Geography
As we saw earlier, JDH could not simply have changed into MH with the
passage of time.62 But of course, diachrony has something to do with it.

59 See Aster 2014.

60 Milik 1957:89 = Milik 1959:131. It should be noted that what is formulated as a
question in the original (“n’y a-t-il pas lieu dès lors de considerer ce dernier comme
une sorte de koinè, formée aux débuts de l’époque perse à partir de de l’hébreu
parlé en Judée et du phénicien parlé sur la côte palestinienne?”) becomes more of
an assertion in the English translation (“it is perhaps reasonable to consider both
languages as descendants of a , which developed at the beginning of the Persian
period out of Hebrew as it was spoken in Judaea and Phoenician as it was spoken on
the coast of Palestine”).
61 Mor 2014.
62 Thus I cannot accept the conclusion of Breuer 2014:138: “According to all this

Tannaitic period approximately a century before its end. In the last hundred years,
a number of processes took place, primarily in the realm of phonology. These
processes are what created the language of the end of the Tannaitic period, which is
the language used in the period in which Tannaitic literature was edited.” For further
discussion of Breuer’s hypothesis, see Bar-Asher Siegal 2016:252.

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 The Social and Geographic Origins of Mishnaic Hebrew

Talshir argued that MH is not really the language spoken by the Tannaim,
who spoke a dialect indistinguishable from JDH, but the language of the
redactors of Tannaitic literature from a somewhat later time and a very
different place:
The language of the epigraphic materials is basically the language
that was alive in Judean in the second century CE. If the differences

manuscripts are so varied, it can be assumed that the latter, in the

in the second century CE, if only because it was not transmitted

directly from the mouths of the Tannaim… The differences that
were enumerated between the language of the epigraphic material

century Judea and third century Galilee.”63

This is, I believe, a major part of the puzzle. It is not easy to accept that
Rabban Gamliel, who lived in Jerusalem a generation before Bar Koseba,
spoke a more progressive dialect of Hebrew than that recorded in the
Bar Koseba texts. But many of the Tannaim did not actually come from
Jerusalem,64 and in any event the Mishnah and other early Rabbinic texts
were put into their current forms by rabbis who lived west and north of
Jerusalem, and perhaps two generations later.

4. Towards a Conclusion: Diachrony + Geography + Demography

Both Talshir, in a different paper, and Qimron made the picture more
complicated and more compelling by invoking not only differences in
chronology and geography but also population shifts.65 Here I will offer

63 Talshir 1996; 1992.

64 Knauf (2006:314–16) concludes that “BH/MH diglossia started at Bethel in the sixth
century.”
65 Talshir 1993 = Talshir 2003; Qimron 2000.

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 Aaron Koller

a synthesis which builds on and slightly augments the reconstructions

offered by these two scholars.
JDH could be renamed Judean Hebrew (=JH).66 This was in fact the
spoken language of the people in Jerusalem and Judea in Hellenistic times.
This dialect (JH) was still spoken through at least the early part of the
second century CE, as shown by the Bar Koseba texts. At the same time
a somewhat different dialect we might call Proto-Mishnaic Hebrew was
being spoken to the west, on the coastal plain and in the Shephelah (see
§2D).67 This dialect was the descendant of western and perhaps northern
colloquial dialects from the Iron Age (as was seen above, in §§2A and
2B). Due to its homeland north and west of Jerusalem, it had long been

(§2Dd). On the other hand, it was more isolated from linguistic changes
emanating from south and west of Jerusalem, such as those provoked by
contact with Nabateans (§2Dc).
The most important component of this historical scheme for the stated
topic of this paper is what happened after Bar Koseba’s revolt. At this time,
the demographic catastrophe that followed resulted in the apparent death
of the dialect of JH. It is not preserved in any texts from later than 140 CE
(although, as Breuer argues, some features that disappear from the Eretz
Israel traditions are still visible in the later Babylonian traditions of MH).68
At about the same time, the Rabbinic movement coalesced; according

then migrated farther north to the western Galilee ( 31a–b).

According to Qimron, MH “is basically the language of the Sages of Lod
and nearby places… which became the literary language only several
generations after the destruction of Jerusalem.”69 Both the evidence of
the historical traditions and the indications of contact with speakers of

66 In this, I am in full agreement with Mor 2016. Note the title of the book, as opposed
to the dissertation on which it is based (Mor 2009).
67 See also Young & Rezetko 2008:241–42.
68 Breuer 2014.
69 Qimron 2000:235–36. Qimron notes (n. 19) that “Precise epigraphical evidence of

164
 The Social and Geographic Origins of Mishnaic Hebrew

Greek, and perhaps also Phoenician, point in the same direction: west.
The most economical hypothesis is that the dialect that had formerly been
the spoken dialect on the coastal plain and in the Shephelah seems later
to have migrated north with the Rabbis, and became the language of the
Mishnah.
This dialect preserved some archaic features, especially in syntax,
that go back to the Iron Age but are not from BH. It was affected by
the encounter with Phoenician in the Shephelah and on the coast, and
later absorbed many loanwords from Greek, as opposed to the inland JH,

isolated from some of the linguistic changes taking place in the province
of Judea, including the late loss of metathesis in verbs and others.
MH, then, could accurately be called “Western” or “Lowland” Hebrew,
as opposed to JH, in the second century CE and earlier. Its use in the
great text at the beginning of the third century CE is what gave us the
nomenclature currently in use.

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