Mar 13 2024 1
In this episode of Hebrew Voices, The Man Who Taught His Children Ancient Greek: Part 1, Nehemia joins Cambridge University lecturer Dr. Benjamin Kantor to discuss using manuscript errors and transcriptions to reconstruct old Greek and Hebrew pronunciations.
I look forward to reading your comments!
PODCAST VERSION:
Hebrew Voices #182 – The Man Who Taught His Children Ancient Greek: Part 1
You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.
Nehemia: So, this was like a profound realization I had in my undergrad at Hebrew University. We were learning Phoenician epigraphy; that was the name of the class, Introduction to Epigrafia Kna’anit or something like this, yeah, Canaanite. And the professor said, “Here’s the Shin, and in this inscription is pronounced ‘th’, but here, from 200 years later, it was pronounced ‘sh’.” And somebody raised their hand and very innocently asked, “How do you know that?” And he didn’t have an answer.
…
Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Benjamin Kantor, who is a post-doc researcher at University of Cambridge in Biblical Hebrew Philology, and he did his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you, Dr. Kantor, for being here with us.
Dr. Kantor: Yes. Thank you for having me.
Nehemia: Yeah. I saw you give a talk at the SBL a few years back, and I’m like, this is amazing stuff, what you’re doing. This is the kind of thing that I dreamed one day could be done, and essentially, you’re doing it. What I understood you to be doing is reconstructing the pronunciation of ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew. And that’s amazing because, look, I deal with a lot of people who… and we’ll talk about the letter Vav, hopefully we’ll have time to. I love the letter Vav. But they’ll say, “You know, Nehemia, you pronounce Hebrew with Vav, and that’s because your ancestors came from Europe and you’re really just speaking Yiddish, because there is no Vav in ancient Hebrew,” meaning a “v” sound.
Dr. Kantor: Sure, sure.
Nehemia: And I’m going to use these… I’m trying to use terms that everyone understands. We’ll talk later about bilabial stops and bilabial fricatives and labiodental fricatives, and you explain what that is. So, the “v” sound versus the “w” sound. And then you’ll get people who will say, “Well, you know, when we read Hebrew, we do the ancient Hebrew.” And then it’s just like a made-up thing.
And what I love about what you’re doing is, you’re actually finding evidence of how things were pronounced, and little clues. So, tell us a little bit about how that works. How can you know how an ancient language was spoken?
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. It’s a great question. We have to start by asking what language we’re after first, right? Because there’s going to be different methodologies for different languages, right? Which makes sense, because not everything is the same type of language, same type of phonology, same type of script, same type of alphabet.
So, I’ll start with Greek because it’s probably a little bit easier to understand, and then I’ll move and talk about Hebrew, because it’s a bit more complicated.
So, with Greek and for those who know me, I just came out with a big book about how ancient Greek was pronounced.
Nehemia: Tell us about that. Because let’s assume nobody in this audience knows you.
Dr. Kantor: Sure, sure.
Nehemia: Like, you taught your children to speak ancient Greek. Is that right?
Dr. Kantor: Well, my first-born son, yes. As he was growing up, one and two… He’s about to turn six now. Already from one year old I started speaking in ancient Greek with him and just…
Nehemia: Like, not Modern Greek, but actually Koine Greek.
Dr. Kantor: Koine Greek.
Nehemia: It’s amazing.
Dr. Kantor: He picked it up really quickly. And the thing is, it’s not so miraculous when you think of the fact that thousands and thousands used to do that in ancient times. It’s just that they need the input, and you have to just give them a lot.
Nehemia: But Koine Greek is a dead language now, right? I mean, no… I shouldn’t say nobody because obviously somebody… nobody speaks it as their native tongue. Look, so this is what Ben-Yehuda did, famously. He came to Israel, and he started speaking to his first son, Benzion, only in Hebrew. And then his daughter, who was born after that, only in Hebrew, and eventually they learned other languages too, because it wasn’t really sustainable. But their first language was really Hebrew, and they were the first children for over a thousand years. We’ll talk about how long. And you did that with Koine Greek. That’s absolutely amazing!
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. I mean, it’s not like my son only spoke Koine Greek.
Nehemia: No, so it wasn’t his first language. But still, to be able to speak it fluently… that’s astounding.
Dr. Kantor: Well, I wouldn’t say he could speak it fluently, but…
Nehemia: To be able to speak it at all is astounding.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, hespeaks some. And a lot of it came down to just having a lot of time with him. And you know, it’s not always possible to do this. But due to various circumstances in our life at the time, I was spending a lot of time with him every day, which is more than I might have gotten to otherwise. It was really a very nice thing. And so, I just said, “I’m going to go,” and I probably, for a stretch of months, did probably roughly 50% in Greek with him every day, or at least tried to get around that number. And I don’t do it as much anymore, so it’s not as common. But at that time, I did a lot, so he could pick it up quick and understand. And he understood quite a bit, so there was probably a time where we could do our basic daily life interactions with a two-year-old in Greek. It was really fun.
So, for those who don’t know, I just came out with a book about how Koine Greek was pronounced in Judea, Palestine specifically, from probably about Alexander’s conquest and the spread of Hellenism, and then all the way until the end of the Byzantine period and the advent of Islam in the area. So, almost like a thousand-year period.
Nehemia: Oh, wow. So, somewhere around 332 BCE, give or take, all the way up until 638, give or take as well.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, yeah. Right, right.
Nehemia: Okay. That’s incredible.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. So, for that, what I did… and this wasn’t a methodology that originated with me, but I just used it for this region; there’s two main things that I did. One was look at every inscription and ancient papyrus parchment I could find that was provenant to the area, had some kind of archaeological context and whatnot. So, things from the Dead Sea Scrolls written in Greek, many inscriptions from Jerusalem, Caesarea, and you basically document the spelling of every single word. And then you see what the most common spelling, the “normal standard spelling” is of a word, and then you look at every place where somebody “misspells a word”. And then you document all of those, determine the proportions, statistics over time and century…
And so, basically, we’re looking at… if you were a scholar, say, a thousand years from now, looking back on today, and you found a collection of children learning to write, right? Because literacy is much higher today, so obviously what many people are doing as scribes back then is something a lot of our children do at a much younger age. And so, if you saw children learning to read and write and you just allowed them a bit of freedom, they might spell a word like “tough” as “T-U-F-F” or they might spell a word like “love” as “L-U-V”. And so, you look at that, and if you gather up enough of those spelling interchanges, you can say, “Okay, he’s spelling it T-U-F-F, so, that must mean in this context, that F-F has the same sound as G-H, and then in this context O-U has the same sound as U.” And so, you gather up enough of these spelling interchanges, or “spelling mistakes” if we’re going to be non-scholarly about it, and…
Nehemia: And you say that because maybe they’re not mistakes, right?
Dr. Kantor: Yeah.
Nehemia: There may not have been a standardized spelling for certain things.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, exactly. And I think one of the things that we, as moderns, can overlook, is just how much the printing press invention in the 15th century has affected the way we think about language and writing. Because that finally gives a lot more room for standardization when you can just print things out and get them out.
But before, when everything’s copied by hand, that meant everyone who’s writing, copying things, learned how to write in a certain school or from a certain teacher, and they might have different sorts of conventions. And so, in the ancient times, even though there were standards for spelling and common scribal practices and things that we can see that scribes saw, “Oh, this is a popular convention that I should start doing now, because these others are doing it,” not everyone did it the same way. And so, what might have been just a convention to convey a certain sound, we might call it a mistake. We compare it with what’s in the dictionary. But what’s in the dictionary itself is standardizing a certain form of scribal education, in the case of Greek.
So, with Greek, that’s what I did; document all those times where you have spelling interchanges. And that works really well for Greek because you have vowels, right? Because consonants, you don’t get consonant interchanges very much because, when consonants change, if a sound like tuh becomes thuh, if you don’t have another sound in the language that sounds like thuh, it might just still be represented 99.9% of the time with the same letter. And that’s what we find in Greek is, the consonant interchanges are very, very rare. You have to read hundreds and hundreds of texts to find one, maybe, of a particular one you’re looking for.
There’s a change that I know happened in Greek, but looking through, I think my database covers like 50,000 words, there’s probably less than ten words that actually show an interchange with this consonant. So, consonants are a lot harder to find. But vowels, you’ll find those interchanges everywhere. Sometimes where, of all the words that have a particular vowel in it, some might have variation 40% of the time in a particular period if the sound has changed and scribal conventions have changed just so.
Nehemia: Would you say vowels are also more flexible within languages? I think of the example of English. English has obviously the United Kingdom, and you’re from the US like me and we pronounce vowels quite differently, very differently, in between the US and the UK. And then go to Australia and forget it, right? Whereas with the consonants there’s a lot fewer differences. Would you say that was true of ancient Greek to some extent?
Dr. Kantor: In terms of regional accents? Well, I think a lot of it does come down to just what comes through in the writing. There could have been a good deal of variation in consonants. Like, there’s evidence that in Egypt people would pronounce… they weren’t as good at differentiating between things like duh and tuh due to Coptic influence. I mean, it comes through in the writing sometimes, but it doesn’t always. Whereas vowels, because vowels are all contained in one space, and if one moves from one to another area, like if E is instead pronounced as “ih”, it starts to sound a bit more like “eh”. And so, whenever a vowel changes, it almost always starts to sound like another vowel, or be in between. And so, it’s harder to know how to represent it.
Nehemia: I see.
Dr. Kantor: Whereas consonants don’t do that as much. There are some that kind of encroach on each other, but with writing systems a consonant can change, and whatever letter was used to represent it before is probably still the best one to do so.
Nehemia: So, this was a profound realization I had in my undergrad at Hebrew University. We were learning Phoenician epigraphy; that was the name of the class, Introduction to Epigrafia Kna’anit or something like this, yeah, Canaanite. And the professor said, “Here’s the Shin, and in this inscription is pronounced ‘th’, but here, from 200 years later, it was pronounced ‘sh’.” And somebody raised their hand and very innocently asked, “How do you know that?” And he didn’t have an answer. And I’m like, “You’re right, it’s the same symbol. How do we know it was pronounced ‘thuh’?” Let’s say at some hypothetical point it might have been pronounced ‘thuh’, because you have in Arabic the ‘tha’, but how do we know in these two Phoenician inscriptions that it was? Or Canaanite inscriptions…
So, that’s interesting, what you’re saying, that the symbol remains the same, but its realization, its pronunciation, may differ over time. Wow.
Dr. Kantor: Oftentimes. Yeah. I mean, that’s generally what happens with consonants. And then every once in a while, you get somebody who’s maybe not as well trained to know the standard spelling and they might substitute… Like the sort of things you’ll get is when “duh” becomes “vvv”, then you might get a “Z” symbol to represent it, because then it’s in between.
Nehemia: Because “Z” is similar. Okay.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. So, you do get that occasionally, but it’s not as common; vowels are much more common. So, that’s kind of how it works with Greek is, you document all those times where you have spelling “mistakes” and make a statistical analysis.
And then the other thing you can do… So, that’s something, I mean… when you talk about reconstructing ancient Hebrew pronunciation, you can do that same thing, but because of what I just said, the consonants giving you far less data than the vowels, that method doesn’t yield as much fruit for Hebrew. It does sometimes. Like, there are things you can look at, like you talked about the Vav. Once you start to see Bet and Vav interchanging, then you can conclude, “Okay. This means that the Vav was probably no longer pronounced as ‘wuh’, and now it’s pronounced as ‘vuh’.” And that happens quite early. And so…
Nehemia: Well, let’s save it for later.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, we’ll come back to that later because I know you like the topic. But that’s one. Another one might be if you get Tav interchanging with something like Samekh. Maybe that would happen for a ‘thuh’ sound. So, you do get those occasionally. And then the use of Vav and Yud for matres lectionis can also indicate something.
So, that does work for Hebrew, that same kind of spelling mistakes, or spelling interchange method, but it doesn’t yield as much fruit. What we have with Hebrew, which is also something we have with Greek, is looking at how Hebrew words are written in another languages’ scripts.
So, like when Greek letters are used to transcribe Hebrew, or Latin letters are used to transcribe Hebrew, and we actually have thousands of words like this, maybe 2,000 or 2,500 words in the two main corpora of this in ancient times, mainly, the second column of Origen’s Hexapla, which was like the first parallel Bible in the world…
Nehemia: We’ll come back, and you’ll explain what Hexapla is.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. But one of the columns in this parallel Bible from the 3rd century is the Hebrew Bible written in Greek letters instead of Hebrew. And originally this was the whole Bible, but now we’ve only got about 1,500 words from it. And then Jerome, within a couple of centuries after that, in his commentaries… he learned Hebrew, and in his commentaries, he’ll often quote something from the Hebrew Bible but write it out in Latin letters. And so, a lot of what I work on is analyzing when Hebrew is written in Greek. Which is one of the reasons I did my pronunciation work, to know how Greek was pronounced, so, we’re not just in a circular system, right?
Nehemia: Right. This is aproblem that I’ve seen in a lot of, let’s say in the popular realm, which trickles down from the scholarly realm, is they’ll say, “Well, this is what it was in ancient Egyptian.” As if we know how ancient Egyptian was pronounced down to the vowels. And actually, the vowels in ancient Egyptian are a huge problem. It’s beyond the scope of this program. Or they’ll talk about, “Well, we see this in the Akkadian inscriptions.” Well, how do we know how to pronounce Akkadian? That’s a whole realm, and it’s not that simple.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. Can I just say something on that? Because that brings up a fun memory. One of my professors during my PhD studies was talking about… she was a brilliant professor. She is an epigrapher, and she had been meeting with some Indo-European historical linguists and they were talking about pronunciation. Because often, dealing with things like Phoenician, Punic and ancient Semitic languages, you often deal with these transcriptions and going back and forth between pronunciations.
She’s like, “So, I always wonder, we often go from taking assumptions about pronunciation of Indo-European languages that are transcribing our languages. And so, how do you guys know how?” And they’re like, “Well, we get it from you!” It’s just like realizing that, at the end of the day, I think with historical phonology, and this is my main field, we have to admit a lot of what we’re doing is kind of circular. But we just keep going around in the circle and rechecking everything and making sure that it all makes sense. Because sometimes that’s all you can do. Sometimes with ancient studies the best you can do is operate with an assumption and then see if it works with everything, and then when you come back around you might have to refine it a bit and go again and again.
So, I think that to a degree it always is going to be like that. But, when everything does work quite nicely together, there’s a high probability that it is the way it was.
Nehemia: Well, like an example of Egyptian, we’re essentially relying on Coptic, and that’s a living linguistic tradition. There are still people who recite the prayers in Coptic, or in the 19th century, when it was documented, for sure there were. And so, if something had changed in Coptic, we might know about it. And I’ve seen examples where they can understand where things have changed, or maybe we don’t know. Like, people will say to me, again with the Vav, and they’re so confident. And I’ll say, “Well, how do you know how the Mem is pronounced?”
I mean, if you look at every Jewish community around the world, they all pronounce it something like muh. Unless there’s some I don’t know about. And then with the Vav, we have variation; that we’ll talk about. So, that’s fascinating what you’re saying. So, with the Hebrew, you said you’re looking at Greek, and so, you did the Greek to get to the Hebrew. I love that. That’s amazing.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. I mean, it is really funny, right? My giant, almost 900-page book, it’s titled The Pronunciation of New Testament Greek, because I focus on 1st century and Roman period. And then subtitled Judeo-Palestinian Greek Phonology and Orthography from Alexander to Islam because that was really the full corpus of it.
But yeah, a lot of what the beginning of that was actually doing research on the Greek of Judeo-Palestine for my work on ancient Hebrew phonology. Because a lot of what was done on it before just took it for granted that ancient Greek phonology is all the same everywhere. I mean, people wouldn’t have said that, but you’re dealing with a very specific context. And then people would quote Allen’s Vox Graeca, the general ancient classical Greek phonology work. And it’s like, “Well, we really do need something specific to the time and region.”
Nehemia: Right.
Dr. Kantor: And so, that was kind of the start of that. So, you look at, then, Hebrew transcribed into Greek. And so, something like shalom, you know, is Sigma-Alpha-Lambda-Omega-Mi. And you look at enough of those, compare it to how Greek was pronounced contemporaneously, and then reconstruct what that meant for Hebrew pronunciation. But again, that’s just one ancient tradition of Hebrew.
Nehemia: And so, there you just brought an example where there’s a limitation, which is that Greek, as far as I understand, didn’t have a “shuh” sound. Right? So, we can’t assume that… you know, in the Tanakh we have the switch between… some Israelites pronounced it shibbolet, we’re told, and some pronounced it sibbolet. And we can’t assume that in the 1st century in Israel they pronounced it “suh”, just because it’s transcribed as Sigma. And I apologize for my Greek pronunciation. That’s what I learned at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. So, it works partly and partly it doesn’t work, right? Meaning, you have some kind of an “O” sound, clearly, I think you said… Did you say Omega or…
Dr. Kantor: Omega.
Nehemia: Omega. Okay, so, you’ve got an “O” sound there, but the “shuh” and suh… something is literally lost in transcription in this case, right?
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. And it’s an interesting one because we know that different Hebrew speaking communities pronounced that consonant differently at some point. So, you mentioned the shibbolet thing. And even late in the Second Temple period one of the defining linguistic traits that differs the Samaritan tradition from others is that Samaritan will pronounce the Sin as a “shuh”, so…
Nehemia: Whether it’s Shin or Sin, in Jewish Hebrew, you’re saying they pronounce it “shuh”.
Dr. Kantor: Right. So, if you have a word like ya’aseh, “will do,” in Samaritan, it’s yeishi, with a “shuh” sound, and things like that. That was the original sound, which was probably something like sthuh, became a merged “suh” in Jewish Hebrew and “shuh” in Samaritan Hebrew. And so, there are different things like this where, even in ancient times already you have different dialects, different traditions of Hebrew with different pronunciations. And we don’t have access to all of them, but some of them we can trace.
Nehemia: In the case of Samaritan Hebrew, we essentially have access to modern Samaritans, who people have studied and recorded for decades. So, we don’t know if 2,000 years ago in Shchem… or do we know? That’s actually a better question. Do we know if 2,000 years ago in Shchem, Samaritans, or what later became Samaritans, distinguished between “shuh” and “suh”? One of the examples that I asked a Samaritan about is, so, we have Bilaam Ben Be’or (Balaam), who’s called Shtum Ha’ayin, which means, “the open eye”. But if all “shuh” and “suh” are the same, it could be Stum Ha’ayim, which means the shut eye. And maybe there’s even an intended pun there in the Bible, in the Torah, in Numbers. So, do we know if 2,000 years… do we have any evidence one way or the other if 2,000 years ago… Maybe not Samaritans per se, but if there were differences like that, let’s say in the Hebrew of Samaritans or Jews in 1st century in Israel?
Dr. Kantor: So, I think we can be pretty confident that there are differences, partly because there are some ancient traditions that record differences. And the ones I’m thinking about in particular are often between the colloquial language and the biblical register.
Nehemia: Okay.
Dr. Kantor: Like, take for example, the name Rivka,Rebecca in English. We get Rebecca from the Septuagint, which has it as Rho-Epsilon-Beta-Epsilon-Kappa-Kappa-Alpha, where it’s literally “reh-beh-kka”. Whereas in Hebrew it’s just two syllables: Riv-ka. Now, I think that was probably actually a particular biblical tradition that did that to very orthoepically preserve orthodoxy.
Nehemia: Explain “orthoepically.”
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, yeah.
Nehemia: If you just did an interview with Jeffrey, I’m sure he probably used that word.
Yeah, but people might be watching it in a different month or…
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, and so…
Nehemia: He absolutely talks about orthographically and empathetically…
Dr. Kantor: And so, orthoepic… “orthoepy” basically just means that readers of a biblical tradition, of a textual tradition, will do extra careful things while reading to make sure the reading is preserved right, and so that words don’t run together, that consonants are pronounced clearly, that vowels are pronounced clearly, and things like that.
Nehemia: And so, it’s like my grandmother, who was an immigrant from Eastern Europe, used to say to me, “Nehemia’le, enunciate! Enunciate!” Because that’s how she learned English. Her English was not great when she first arrived in the US. And so, she was always told, “enunciate”. So, is that what orthoepic is? That you’re almost exaggerating the features in order to preserve the pronunciation?
Dr. Kantor: Yes, yes, exactly, right. So, you might have things like… like in Tiberian Hebrew, you have a word like “mikdosh” for temple or sanctuary, and sometimes you get the Kuf geminated to really separate it clearly. So, like mi’q’dosh. And so, I think that’s kind of what was happening with Rebecca. It was Rivka or Riv’qa, but “Riv’q’a” to really make it clear. So, you get that in the Greek. I think that’s maybe what’s behind the Septuagint. I could be wrong, but I think that’s maybe what’s going on.
But we have, actually really interestingly, on the west coast of ancient Israel, if I’m remembering right, in the first few centuries of the Common Era, two inscriptions from the same family context. One seems to be done by a professional scribe, and it has that “Reve’ka”, and then one seems to be done by a less professional scribe, perhaps just someone the family knew, and there it’s just Rho-Epsilon-Beta-Kappa-Alpha for Rev’ka. And so, to me that shows, “Okay, there are maybe multiple pronunciations going on, maybe one more colloquial, one more for biblical register.”
We have something similar in Jerome, where, when he’s transcribing the Bible, a place where etymologically, historically, you would have had a “double-R” in something like Merrehem. He just writes a single-R, and that’s this compensatory lengthening where, instead of saying a consonant twice, you get a long vowel or something, which we see in the Hebrew traditions of the Middle Ages. But then when he’s writing/transcribing Hebrew in another non-biblical context, there you do find the double-R in barrama.
Nehemia: So, that’s a really cool thing, the double-R, or double-Resh, essentially. So, this is something… there’s… You know, Nehemya Aloni published… I’m sure you know about this, this grammar by… I think it was named Eli Ben-Yehuda HaNazir.
Dr. Kantor: Oh, yeah, yeah, yes.
Nehemia: And he says, “I sat in the squares of Tiberius to listen to the speech of the common people,” and the specific issue he was going there to… he had written this grammar based on the Hebrew of the Bible. I’m not sure what that means at this point anymore, but what he thought was the Hebrew of biblical times, and he says, “There’s this one rule. I’m not sure if it’s correct, that there’s a Resh with a dagesh…” Which you don’t have graphically in the Aleppo Codex, for example, but in his grammar that existed.
So, he went to hear; do people actually speak that way? And he determined, yeah, they actually do. And you’re saying that’s in an inscription from hundreds of years later. He’s the 9th century, I believe, or maybe 10th century, and you’re saying hundreds of years earlier we have an inscription that reflects that… not inscription. We have Jerome. Wow!
Dr. Kantor: Jerome’s… It’s actually… I can’t remember. I think he attributes it to… it’s not exactly the New Testament, because he calls it the Gospel of the Hebrews, and it’s in the Hebrew rendering of… I can’t remember if this is the quotation of Psalm 118 or the context of Jesus coming into Jerusalem, but it’s the phrase, “In the highest,” and it’s barrama in this Gospel of the Hebrews, according to Jerome. I mean, people can check me on that. I think that’s what the source is.
Nehemia: Oh, really? Okay. Wow.
Dr. Kantor: I mean, I’ve written about this somewhere in one of my things, so, it’s written somewhere…
Nehemia: Don’t you love it when you meet a scholar, and they’re like, you wrote on page 32 five years ago… I don’t remember. First of all, I wrote that ten years ago, and I only got published five years ago. I don’t remember.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. Yes. It’s probably in something I wrote about performance and recitation of Hebrew in ancient times.
Nehemia: We’ll find the link and we’ll put it up on nehemiaswall.com.
Dr. Kantor: So, yeah, there’s evidence like that for different pronunciation traditions, and things like that continue even into modern traditions. Like, there are many communities where you’ll find the biblical tradition can only have a single Resh, whereas the Mishnaic tradition, which I think probably reflects something closer to spoken, could have the doubled Resh and so forth.
Nehemia: Spoken, like, in what period are we talking about?
Dr. Kantor: Like ancient times. So, talking about the Roman period, the Tannaitic period, where you’d have a spoken element of Hebrew, and I think Mishnaic Hebrew phonology often shows more semblance with that, and the biblical tradition has a more conservative…
Nehemia: So, for the audience, tell us what that means, Mishnaic Hebrew.
Dr. Kantor: Oh yes, right.
Nehemia: Assume they don’t know what the Mishnah is… and what does Mishnaic Hebrew have that’s different for Biblical Hebrew? Was it a living language? Or was this an artificial scholarly language in the time of Mishnaic Hebrew?
Dr. Kantor: Right. So, Mishnaic Hebrew would, in the way I’m using it, go back to the Tannaitic period we’re talking about, the first two centuries of the Common Era. It’s the language of what would become the Mishnah, a very foundational document in Judaism. But in terms of the periods, it’s later than Biblical Hebrew, and there are a lot of different opinions about how Mishnaic Hebrew originated. Some people consider it a continuation of just a different dialect because it looks different than the Bible. The verbal tense system looks different. The vocabulary is a bit different. The grammar is different. And so, some would say it’s a continuation of separate dialect.
Others would say it’s sort of the product of imperfect learning of Hebrew by people who were more Aramaic speakers. Others would say it’s a continuing development of Hebrew past, the later stages of Biblical Hebrew. I mean, there’s a bunch of different theories around for what it is, but I think in one way or another, Mishnaic Hebrew, even though it is literature and a literary language and how it’s appeared in the Mishnah, I think it flows more out of the spoken language at the time of the first couple centuries of the Common Era than Biblical Hebrew would.
So, that’s why, if I see something that’s present in Mishnaic Hebrew, but not in Biblical Hebrew, I might be more prone to think it reflects something of the spoken language.
Nehemia: So, let me see if I understood… so… or, what’s your position on it? I guess that’s the better question. In other words, you’re saying one possibility is, in the time of Jeremiah there were people who spoke an earlier form, proto-Mishnaic Hebrew. And the second possibility is, no, it was a development out of Biblical Hebrew; you go several centuries, and you end up with Mishnaic Hebrew. Is that what you’re saying?
Dr. Kantor: So, yeah. Personally, I would take a very diplomatic view that would say there’s some element of all three of those theories. There are some who very much more strongly say it’s just a continuation of a different dialect that existed as early as Jeremiah. I think that’s going too far because I don’t know if there’s a lot of evidence for that. But we do know that there’s a lot of Hebrew that continued that we don’t have recorded in the Bible, obviously, because the Bible is a very limited corpus. So, it’s a continuation of some dialect of Hebrew that’s, to some degree or another, related to Biblical Hebrew, but not necessarily the same thing. But also, just development of language change. Obviously, Aramaic contact, people coming back from exile and…
Nehemia: And a whole bunch of Greek, too…
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, and then Greek. Probably plenty of Greek loanwords in there and all of that. So, I think it’s a combination of several factors. It is a continuation of the diachronic development of Hebrew. So, you could see it as… you look at late biblical Hebrew books and you see more parallels with Mishnaic Hebrew.
Nehemia: Diachronic; that means how it changes over time.
Dr. Kantor: Oh, I used that word. Yeah, thank you.
Nehemia: No, no. You’re good.
Dr. Kantor: Thank you.
Nehemia: One of my jobs is to try to translate for the audience. Look, frankly, one of my jobs is to pretend to be an idiot and ask questions I know the answer to. And look, I might have a different understanding of what the answer is, but my audience has heard me. I want them to hear you.
Dr. Kantor: No, it’s very good. Yeah, of course, of course. So, yeah, I think natural development of Hebrew over time, because late biblical Hebrew does seem similar to Mishnaic Hebrew in some ways, but also, contact with Aramaic and all of that. So, I would say elements of all of that come into play with… I mean, it’s something that’s going to be further debated and further refined and all of that. I think Nili Samet is working on commentary on Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, where she’ll deal with some of these issues. So, yeah.
Nehemia: So, she’s going to tie that, you think, somehow to… we haven’t read her commentary yet, but presumably she’s going to tie it to something in proto-Mishnaic Hebrew or something like that.
Dr. Kantor: Well, she was here, actually… was it earlier this year or last year? And she gave a talk about some of the lexical different vocabulary items that she was mapping out in terms of the history of Hebrew and how it relates to things. And so, it seemed quite interesting. So, I think she might have some good advances in this discussion to look out for. Yeah.
Nehemia: Okay. Cool, cool. The example that comes to mind for me is the sheh instead of asher, which you have in Kohelet. All right, wow. So, we talked about the Shin, by the way, and something that came to mind for me just now is, in proto-Ashkenazic… that’s the time I prefer, the Ashkenazic Hebrew before the 14th century, there was no distinguishing Shin and Sin, to the point where I look at the Bible manuscripts and they just left out the diacritical mark, because…
And then there are what we call Masoretic lists, where they’re like, “These are the words written with a Shin, and these are the words with the with the Sin,” which was entirely hypothetical for them because they didn’t have a way of distinguishing the pronunciation. So, they needed a list to tell them, “In case you want to know, this word isn’t related to that other word.” That’s a Sin, like shtoom and stum, right? So, that’s interesting. So, let’s get to the Vav.
Dr. Kantor: Sure, sure.
Nehemia: So, how do we know that… I mean, it’s an axiom of biblical Hebrew linguistics, let’s say mainstream biblical Hebrew linguistics, that the original pronunciation of Vav was, and I’m going to use your term here, and let’s see if I can get it right. I made myself a little cheat sheet here…
Dr. Kantor: Sure, sure, sure.
Nehemia: It was a “labial velar approximant.” Maybe it was “wuh”. Like water in English. Maybe not exactly, but something like that. So, how do we know that?
Dr. Kantor: Well…
Nehemia: Do we know that?
Dr. Kantor: So, there would be two ways of getting at this question. One is what I already mentioned about the transcriptions, and you look at how things are transcribed and try to reconstruct based on that. The other would be cognate evidence. So, I’ll answer first from the cognate evidence…
Nehemia: Tell us what cognate means.
Dr. Kantor: Oh yeah. So, cognate is where you have languages that are related; if a word might sound the same in multiple languages, or similar enough where you can kind of assume there’s some sort of relationship. So, like if you think of Greek and Latin, for example, have many shared words. English, French and German, all sorts of things like that.
So, when you look at the Semitic languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Akkadian, things like that, there is no “vuh” reconstructed for Proto-Semitic. All the languages that we can trace would attest to, at least at their earlier stages, having…
Nehemia: What is Proto-Semitic?
Dr. Kantor: Right. So, Proto-Semitic would be like a grandfather or grandmother of all the Semitic languages. And in linguistics, historical linguistics, everyone who does this is aware that it’s not going to work perfectly like this, but a “proto language” is something that you hypothesize as sort of the parent language from which all the daughter languages come. And so, at least theoretically, you should be able to see what happened, see what the proto language was like, and map out changes to explain how all the other languages have their different sounds, or words, or things like that.
Nehemia: So, in English we have Proto-Germanic. So, both English and German go back… and Dutch, all those go back to Proto-Germanic, but then Proto-Germanic goes back to Proto-Indo-European. So, that’s the thing you’re talking about, right?
Dr. Kantor: So, things like things that, where you eventually have a proto language, and you can have proto languages for each sub-branch of it. So, you can have Proto-Semitic, and then from that you would have two main branches where you’d have Akkadian on one side and the other things like Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic, Ugaritic on the other side. But even within those, then you could talk about proto-Arabic, and then beneath that are all the Arabic dialects. And you could have proto-Hebrew, and within that are the Hebrew traditions, like Samaritan, and…
Nehemia: And so, you’re saying when we look at all of the Semitic languages, the assumption is, when you go back far enough, there’s a “wuh”, not a “vuh”.
Dr. Kantor: Right. So, like if you look at Arabic, Arabic has a “wuh”. If you look at Akkadian, the evidence is that it was a “wuh”, even though that’s fallen out…
Nehemia: Wait, tell me that. I don’t know that story. It’s fallen out in Akkadian studies.
Dr. Kantor: In Akkadian…
Nehemia: Oh, it’s dropped the “wuh”.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. Like the “wuh” is not always present where you might expect it historically. It hasn’t dropped out entirely. You still have it in words, like for example, like the conjunction… because I was thinking of the conjunction wa, like in Arabic you have wa, whereas in Akkadian that’s just oo.
Nehemia: So, in other words, “wa” means “and”.
Dr. Kantor: Yes.
Nehemia: In Akkadian, the word for “and” is oo.
Dr. Kantor: One of the words for “and” is oo. But you do get it in other places. Like you have war’dum, or washbaq, whichmeans “I live here”, “I reside here”. So, you do have wa in Akkadian. But I was thinking of the conjunction Vav, which is why I said that, because the parallel to Vav, “veh…”
Nehemia: So, in other cases, it hasn’t fallen out. It’s still…
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, in other cases, you still have it.
Nehemia: In Akkadian, how do we know how to pronounce… and we’re not going to go down this path, but how confident are we in how to pronounce Akkadian? Meaning, how do we know how to… don’t we know how to pronounce Akkadian because they basically have their version of the Rosetta Stone? What is it? The Behistun inscription. I’m sure I’m mispronouncing that. And so, they’re basing that on Farsi, which then goes… anyway… So, yeah.
Dr. Kantor: I’m not an expert in the Akkadian historical phonology so I won’t say what all is available for there. There would be better people to ask than me for that. But I can say we do have… I mean, just like the same methods I mentioned for Greek and Hebrew, we do have scribal interchanges over time, because Akkadian is one of those things people forget is attested with an enormous amount of material in the ancient period, like…
Nehemia: Millions of documents which haven’t even been translated.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. Sitting in tablets and museums and places and all that. So, there’s a lot of material to see scribal interchanges and scribal changes over time. And then, when we get late enough, this is something I worked a bit on, is we do have Greek transcription of Akkadian, but this is much later. So, it can be a bit more difficult.
Nehemia: How much later?
Dr. Kantor: So, like around the turn of the Common Era. So, like maybe Hellenistic period time.
Nehemia: So, 1st century BC, 1st century CE.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. Around there, give or take, two or three centuries in either direction. Yeah. So, we do have things there, and we do know that there do come to be certain interchanges over time particularly with the sign for “wuh”, the sign for “muh”.
Nehemia: So, we have an example like that in Biblical Hebrew versus Aramaic, or even later Hebrew. We have argaman, in Aramaic that’s arga…
Dr. Kantor: Oh, yeah.
Nehemia: Argawan or argavan. You tell me, is it argavan or argawan?
Dr. Kantor: It depends on the period. So, we got on the cognate…
Nehemia: That’s a color, so… what color that is exactly? Uh, I’m slightly colorblind so, yeah. Crimson something.
Dr. Kantor: But all that was just to give the background to say that, for those working on historical phonology in each of their languages, Akkadian, Arabic, all of that, it makes the most sense because all those languages have “wah”, that Proto-Semitic certainly had a “wah”. And so, we would expect if at some point Hebrew does have a “vuh”, which we know obviously it does, because there’s plenty of pronunciation traditions that have that, then at some point, between Proto-Semitic and Hebrew, “wuh” changed to “vuh”. I mean, that is pretty well established. The question when, exactly, that happened is a more difficult thing. Somebody could argue it happened earlier or later, but so, that cognate evidence is the basic thing.
Then the other side would be, okay, the earliest transcription… like, the earliest tradition we have of any biblical Hebrew reading tradition, like, documented as a pronunciation… I’m not talking about the Hebrew text itself, because that doesn’t have vowels so we can’t use that as a continuous documentation. You can use where they write the vowel letters sometimes to say, “Okay, here’s a word here or there,” but in terms of continuous, the earliest thing we have is those Greek transcriptions that I worked on. There’s nothing before that that’s a continuous transcription of a reading tradition giving you the vowels.
Nehemia: What do you mean by continuous?
Dr. Kantor: So, you could say the Dead Sea Scrolls are a few centuries earlier, but with them, the information you’re going to get about pronunciation is only going to be occasional because the consonantal text, if you just have Dalet-Bet-Reish, that’s not going to tell you much about how it was pronounced.
Nehemia: So, it’s like what we talked about before, is the Shin “thuh” or is the Shin “shuh”? Well, we need another language or some kind of statement, maybe in Hebrew, that could happen as well. Like when Sa’adiya Ga’on makes the statement that all of the Hebrew letters have the same pronunciation except for these, and he doesn’t mention Vav as one of those. It’s clear Sa’adya pronounced it as “wuh”. It doesn’t mean all the Jews at that time did; obviously they didn’t, as we’ll get to. Unless he pronounced Arabic with a “vuh,”. This is… you know, it’s mind boggling!
You talked about the circle, right? That’s based on my assumptions about Arabic. That’s interesting. All right, so…
Dr. Kantor: So, yes, that continuous question, meaning just that there will be occasional spelling interchanges, but you can’t just read word by word and see how it’s pronounced.
Nehemia: Oh, I see what you’re saying.
Dr. Kantor: Whereas the Secunda, the Greek transcriptions of Hebrew, it is just continuous. Like if you found Genesis 1:1, you’d be able to read, “Breishith bara,” you know, it continuously… and you wouldn’t have to just look for spelling interchanges because every word is written out with Greek, with the vowels, the Greek consonants. So, even if the information it’s giving you isn’t complete in terms of,
“Is the Sigma representing this or that,” because Sigma can represent a number of letters. It’s at least there, it’s giving you something.
And so, that’s the earliest record we have. And there, when they transcribe Vav, they do it in two different ways. One, at the beginning of a word, like when it’s the conjunction Vav, “and” it’s just Omicron-Epsilon. That’s in Greek at the time, contemporary Greek, this is the OO sound. So, if you’re using a vowel sound to represent a consonant, chances are it’s probably going to be a semivowel like “wuh” or “yuh”. Because Yud, “yuh,” is transcribed with just an “ee” sound, and so, “wuh”, especially at the beginning of a word, “oo” or “wou” would be transcribed that way.
If it was “vuh” then you might make use of Greek Veta, which had shifted from “buh” to “vuh”, using both lips, like a Spanish “vuh” sound. And then we also see in the middle of words… Now, I wouldn’t totally deny the possibility that the other method could also transcribe a “vuh” sound. The other method is, after the vowels Alpha or Epsilon, which are like A or E, then you just get the Epsilon. Now, historically in Greek that was an “auo” or “euo” sound, but around this time, it came to be pronounced as “av” or “ev”. And so, you could argue that after a vowel like “ah” or “eh”, it had shifted to “vuh”.
However, it seems to be just a scribal convention, because of those historical diphthongs, Alpha, Ipsilon, Epsilon, Ipsilon which are associated with these “auo”/ “euo” sounds. Because that’s how you get it when it transcribes Arabic or Akkadian too, when we have those diphthongs. And we know that shift to “vuh” didn’t happen there.
But there is one word: it’s the word gewatto or gewatho, for “his pride”. And there, it’s a different form than the biblical form, which would be, ge’evato or ga’avato. There it has the “eh” vowel instead. It’s a long “ehh” with an Eta, andthere, because you don’t have the scribal convention, because Eta–Ipsilon wasn’t the same diphthong status as the other ones, which were short diphthongs typically. There you go back to the Omicron-Ipsilon to transcribe the Vav sound. So, literally it comes out as “geh-wa-tho”, “ge-yu-wa-tho”. And so, I think all that together suggests that, in the Greek transcriptions of Hebrew from the Roman period, that tradition is pronouncing it as “wuh”.
Nehemia: Okay. Wow, that’s fascinating. All right. Let’s shift for a minute, and we’ll come back to this. And tell the audience what the Hexapla is. Let’s even start… what’s the Septuagint? You mentioned that a few times. The LXX. And then, how do we get the Hexapla out of the Septuagint?
Dr. Kantor: Right. So, there are many scholars who would then say that that question requires a seminar and a multi-lecture series…
Nehemia: So, we have the expression in Hebrew, “standing on one leg”.
Dr. Kantor: Yes, yes. Sort of as a legend, first, the Septuagint is what’s considered 70… it means 70, septuaginta, you have domekonda in Greek means “the seventy”, because there’s a legend that 70 translators were gathered in Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE and translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek.
Now, there was probably something that happened in Alexandria involving whether the Jewish community there or Jews coming in from Judeo-Palestine or some combination of that, and translation work that began there and then continued on for the next several centuries to complete the whole Bible, and then further revisions after that. But in short, it goes back to, at least at its beginning, probably Alexandria in Egypt, and Jews translating the Hebrew scriptures into Greek.
Nehemia: But the short answer is, it’s the ancient Greek translation of the Torah, and then eventually the Tanakh.
Dr. Kantor: Yes, yes.
Nehemia: Plus a few other things thrown in there. Okay. And then, how do we get from that, the original Septuagint, let’s call it the “proto-Septuagint”, because we don’t have that. Am I right?
Dr. Kantor: Well, we have reconstructions of, you know…
Nehemia: I mean, what we have are 3rd century manuscripts like Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus, but we don’t have the one from 250 BC or 100 BCE. Maybe fragments of it, so…
Dr. Kantor: Works of, you know, just like the textual, critical endeavor of trying to get back to the earliest retrievable text possible for the Septuagint, as what people would call the old Greek. But then later versions of it are… yeah, that’s mostly what we have in manuscripts.
Nehemia: And then, what’s the Hexapla?
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. It’s interesting, because I think as time has gone on, you know, Origen deserves less and less credit for it. So, Origen, he’s a Church Father. Now, he, of course, was in charge of the whole project, but I think what the final product was… So, this was a work that went on in Caesarea Maritima, on the west coast of ancient Israel, in the middle of the 3rd century. Origin began this work; he was the head of a project that said… There’s scholarly debate about why exactly he did it, but probably one of the reasons was to get a firm, established Septuagint text, because there were different versions out there, and comparing it with the Hebrew to see how it differed with the Hebrew and be able to mark up where a text might be different among different communities. Or it differed from the Hebrew, and so people could know what was going on, basically, when you compare the Greek and Hebrew Bibles and different versions of the Greek text. So, what he did…
Nehemia: And this is the 3rd century CE, right?
Dr. Kantor: Yeah.
Nehemia: So, would you say that by the 3rd century, the Greek Septuagint, meaning the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, was more fluid than the Hebrew text at the time? Because by this time we have… at least we’re told we have, something approximating the Masoretic Text, where Rabbi Akiva, a couple centuries before that, or a century before that, is interpreting the difference of whether there’s a Vav or not a Vav,even though it doesn’t change pronunciation or meaning. So, would you say it was more fluid at this time?
Dr. Kantor: That’s a good question. I suppose it depends on how you define fluid, and this, again, is getting a bit out of my area of expertise. But I would say there’s definitely significant differences between different communities’ versions of the text that were worth sorting through.
Nehemia: And that’s what Origen is attributed to have done.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. He definitely was in charge of the project, but what I’m about to talk about is where I think he deserves less credit. And so, what he ended up doing was putting together a giant book, probably 40 or 50 volumes on a shelf of six… because hexapla is “six-fold”. It means “six-fold” in Greek, six columns; in some places more, but we won’t get into that. Six columns of text. In the furthest left column, you had the Hebrew Bible, probably one word per line, or sometimes two or three words per line…
Nehemia: In Hebrew characters?
Dr. Kantor: In Hebrew characters. This doesn’t survive anywhere, but people who have worked reconstructing that say it must have been there, and it’s in ancient descriptions of it. People who saw it say there was something there. So, I think it’s pretty certain it was there.
And then the second column is matching up to those one, sometimes two or three words per line, the same Hebrew words written out in Greek characters instead of Hebrew. And then after that, there were four separate Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible, one by Aquila, which is probably the closest formally to the Hebrew, and then Symmachus, and then the Septuagint, and then Theodotion.
And so, many, many scholars after Origen would use this, at least when it was still there. It probably got destroyed a few centuries later, after he did it. But…
Nehemia: Was there only one copy of this?
Dr. Kantor: Probably, yeah.
Nehemia: That’s amazing.
Dr. Kantor: There was probably only ever one copy because there are 40 volumes. So, it was…
Nehemia: So, so, we don’t have the original Hexapla. What we have is… what? What do we have?
Dr. Kantor: A lot of… I was describing this to my dad once to illustrate what I was working on. And I was like, “It’s as if you had one of the most important books in all of history. I mean, 40 volumes on a bookshelf. And then somebody just threw a grenade at it, and it exploded, and all these fragments stuck to all sorts of other things. Now we have to try and piece it back together.”
Because that’s really what has happened. I doubt anyone ever copied it in ancient times because it was so huge. It probably sat at Caesarea and a lot of people that did work from it would come and visit it. And I think there was probably a copy of Psalms that circulated more than just in Caesarea, because that’s what we find quoted a lot everywhere else. That’s what we have in the Genizah here. We have a page, the oldest page of any manuscript of the Hexapla that remains to this day is here in Cambridge. And that’s from Psalms. The other one, which is the…
Nehemia: That’s the Palimpsest with the Jerusalem Talmud and one of the poets on it?
Dr. Kantor: Piyyut on it. And then the undertext is the Hexapla. Just very fragmentary bits of it. And then the other one that we have that survived is in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, and that’s Psalms. And then…
Nehemia: Is that also a palimpsest?
Dr. Kantor: That’s also a palimpsest, yes. So, the two most important texts for this are both palimpsests.
Nehemia: Meaning, for the audience, they erased the text of the Hexapla and wrote something else over it, because they didn’t care about the Hexapla. So, these are at least two copies just of Psalms. Okay, so, what else do we have?
Dr. Kantor: And then everything else we have… There are a few others that are … those are the two most important. There are a few others that maintain something of the columns and are just very scattered. Between all of these, it’s not much more than 1,050 words or so. And then everything else is just little tiny bits of quotations in ancient Greek writings, like in the Church Fathers, in the margins of Septuagint manuscripts, in the Syro-Hexapla, which is a Syriac Bible based on the Hexapla to make one text. I won’t get into all the details…
Nehemia: They didn’t have six columns on this.
Dr. Kantor: Not six columns… well, there’s debate about what it was exactly, but it might have been just an annotated Syriac version of the touched up, refined, annotated Septuagint text. But it has a lot of marginal notes to mention differences, and there are some quotations of the Hexapla there. And then, just a lot of things in commentaries and things like that. So…
Nehemia: So, the commentaries are quoting the parts of the Hexapla?
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, they’ll quote parts of the Hexapla. And I should mention, I was thinking a lot of this from the perspective of the second column, the Hebrew and Greek letters, because that’s much more fragmentarily attested. But if you consider all the other translations, we got a lot of that in ancient Greek commentaries on the Bible, where they’ll say, “Oh, and Aquilla says this, and Theodotion says this, and Symmachus renders it this way.”
Nehemia: And we think they’re quoting that from the Hexapla.
Dr. Kantor: Almost certainly, yeah.
Nehemia: I mean, there could have been a manuscript of Aquila, right?
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. It’s certainly… yeah. And so, that’s definitely possible. But usually when they quote them in groups, they’re all together like, okay, they must have been looking at it, or quoting somebody who looked at it. And what we find is much of that… I mean, it’s a bit easier with the Secunda, the Greek transcriptions of the Hebrew…
Nehemia: Tell us what the Secunda is. So, the first column is the Hebrew… well, you kind of did. The Secunda is the Hebrew written out in Greek characters, right?
Dr. Kantor: Right, right.
Nehemia: And so, we don’t have the original except for some Psalms palimpsests. And so, we have…
Dr. Kantor: Well, that wouldn’t be original, it would just be… original format.
Nehemia: Right, it’s at least the original format. So, we have quotations and commentaries, and then we have notations and margins of manuscripts, right?
Dr. Kantor: Right, right. And so, all of that, like for the Secunda, outside of those two main palimpsests, the one in Milan and the one here, it’s all just scattered. And so, you might have, you know, like in John Chrysostom, an Early Church Father, his works, you might find 50 to 100 words. But they’re scattered, so you have to read through his commentary, and there’s one here. You read through it again, and then there’s two here.
Nehemia: And then this brings another problem. So, John Chrysostom, presumably… I probably mispronounced that… he’s got a bunch of manuscripts of his works too, right?
Dr. Kantor: Oh, my goodness!
Nehemia: So, how do we deal with that problem?
Dr. Kantor: So, I wish I had… when I was working on this. So, another thing I have coming out is a critical edition of the Secunda.
Nehemia: Okay! Wow.
Dr. Kantor: So, that’s been a big project that is now in the editing proofing stages. So, within the next couple of years it should be out.
Nehemia: So, did you have to track down all the manuscripts of John Chrysostom?
Dr. Kantor: So, Chrysostom is the absolute worst, because if you could imagine… I went to the library down here to get… so, it’s a big stack of books about this tall, and that is just the index of the manuscripts for Chrysostom.
Nehemia: The index of the manuscripts!
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, the index is about eight volumes tall.
Nehemia: When you say the index, there’s a whole lot of manuscripts is what you’re saying.
Dr. Kantor: Right. So, it takes this many books to say, “Now for his work on this, these are the libraries and the list of manuscripts for this work, for this work.” And that’s just the index. Then you have to go and actually find the manuscript.
Nehemia: How could you possibly check… like, there’s too many data points, and then not all of these… so, how do you do this?
Dr. Kantor: Well, you get everything you can. So, the reason you won’t see a lot of critical editions of Chrysostom’s work in Greek is because it would be such a nightmare to go through all of that material. But for me, it wasn’t so bad because I’m just doing two words here or there.
Nehemia: Oh, right. Okay.
Dr. Kantor: And so, even if there’s 20 or 30 manuscripts for the work I’m dealing with… Because he wrote so much… so for one book of his there might be 20 or 30 manuscripts. So, it’s not… when I’m just checking one word in it, you can go through all of those.
Nehemia: I see. Okay.
Dr. Kantor: So, yeah, you look at digitizations online. There was one I found in the Wren Library here. I emailed with some monks on a peninsula in Greece to send me…
Nehemia: In Mount Athos?
Dr. Kantor: Yes, exactly. To send me a CD rom of the images…
Nehemia: Oh wow! Oh, that’s cool!
Dr. Kantor: Or in other cases, printed out images that they sent in the mail. And so, yeah, I have in my library over there a CD-Rom from them. So, you gather all this stuff any way you can, and you just document as much as you can.
Nehemia: That’s a monumental work you’ve undertaken.
Dr. Kantor: Well, I…
Nehemia: I want to pause here for a minute. And just… for the audience to appreciate, this is a monumental work for you to make a critical edition of the Secunda, of this Hebrew-transcribed-into-Greek, because, like you said, there’s so many different… Like, it’s not just that you went to the printed edition of John Chrysostom and said, “This is what it says,” you tracked down the manuscripts. That’s incredible!
Dr. Kantor: It definitely took a long time, and it’s going to be quite a headache to proof that whole book, which I’ve just started recently, going through the proofing, finally. But the most interesting thing, I think, was one of Chrysostom’s commentaries is only preserved in Armenian, a portion of the Isaiah commentary, which is where we have a good number of transcriptions. So, analyzing that meant doing a historical phonological analysis of how Armenian transcribes Greek, which transcribes Hebrew.
Nehemia: Oh, wow!
Dr. Kantor: So, that’s probably the most interesting chapter in the book.
Nehemia: Presumably, this Armenian evidence isn’t as robust as things that are still in Greek, I would think, because every time you translate you potentially…
Dr. Kantor: You lose stuff.
Nehemia: You’re maybe lost in translation and then lost in the transmission, so there are two problems. Wow!
Dr. Kantor: Exactly, exactly. So, there’s going to be phonological things that differ, where maybe two sounds in Greek become one in Armenian, and then the transmission thing, and…
Nehemia: Like maybe there are two characters in Armenian… I know nothing about Armenian, that look very similar, and there are mistakes.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Nehemia: Wow! That’s amazing!
Dr. Kantor: I needed help for that one. There’s a professor over at King’s, Bert Vaux, who helped me with some of the Armenian stuff. That’s one of the great things about being in Cambridge is you can get help from experts just down the block.
Nehemia: Wow, that’s really monumental. That’s amazing. All right, so, the Secunda. So, your conclusion from the Secunda, and we’ll take the letter Vav as an example, is that the Vav was pronounced “wuh” in the 3rd century CE in, let’s say in Caesarea, where Origen was working. Right?
Dr. Kantor: Yes. In that tradition, the… and the reason I said Origen doesn’t deserve as much credit is related to the answer to this, because for many years people would always say, “Origen wrote the second column”, “Origen did this”, “Origen did that”. But he didn’t know Hebrew well enough to do that. I think he got the second column from the Jewish community of Caesarea, or he saw them doing that kind of transcription thing and said, “Hey, can you guys help me and expand this to the whole Bible?” But I think that tradition originates, and the text, in some fashion or other with the Jewish community of Caesarea. For that community in the late Roman period, I think they had “wuh”. However, that’s not the only piece of evidence in ancient times. You also have… there are a few interchanges in the Dead Sea Scrolls between things like Bet and Vav…
Nehemia: Oh.
Dr. Kantor: …which I think might indicate… Again, some of them are difficult because you could maybe analyze it different grammatically. Could it be a conjunction Vav instead of the preposition Bet, or vice versa? But taken all together, I think there is enough evidence to show that in the Hellenistic Roman period there were already at least some communities… maybe some that had pronunciation “vuh”. But, I think, when we have the continuous traditions like the Secunda, I think that shows a “wuh” pronunciation.
Nehemia: So, I’m going to quote here from… I guess this is your PhD dissertation.
Dr. Kantor: Okay.
Nehemia: And people can download this online, if I’m not mistaken, and it’s freely available, and it’s absolutely… I found it a riveting read. I don’t know that everyone will, but I definitely had to look up a lot of terminology, a lot of linguistic terms that are used here. But you wrote a bilabial fricative, and in parentheses you wrote the Greek Beta. So, that would be pronounced…
Dr. Kantor: “Vuh”.
Nehemia: “Vuh”. Well, “vuh.” We’ll get to that.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. Like making a “vuh” sound, but with just your lips. So…
Nehemia: So, there’s actually two “V’s” in English. Am I right about that? Meaning there’s the V of the word “valve”, and then there’s like the normal V of “have”, and I don’t know, vault, or maybe… But in any event, linguistically there’s a distinction…
Let’s dwell on that for a minute. What is the difference between… and here are the terms; the voiced bilabial fricative and the voiced labiodental fricative? So, one’s written with the Greek Beta by linguists, not in ancient times…
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nehemia: …in this International Phonetic Alphabet, and the other is written with a “V”. What’s the difference between… Because to me they both sound like “vuh.”
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, yeah. So, the voiced bilabial fricative… In phonetic terminology, we use terms that talk about where you make a sound. So, if you have a dental sound, it means where your tongue is on your teeth. Like dental. And labial, like lips. So, if you’re making a sound with the labials, like a “bi-labial,” bilabial meaning two lips, “stop” would be like “puh” or “buh”, because you stop the air. “Buh”, Bilabial stop.
Now, a fricative means you continue to let the air go through with the two lips, so, it becomes “vvvvvuh”, and then a labiodental means you’re combining a lip and the teeth like that “vuh”, and then letting the sound go through.
Nehemia: And those are two different sounds.
Dr. Kantor: They’re two different sounds.
Nehemia: Linguists identify two different sounds there, whereas I think 99.99% of the audience, including me, will… if I heard two audio recordings of that I’m not sure I could distinguish them.
Dr. Kantor: Right, because in English, we don’t have the “vuh” sound, whereas in Spanish, you know, some of the Spanish “vuh” is pronounced as “vvvuh”.
Nehemia: That’s really interesting. So, going back to Saadia Gaon… I believe it’s Saadia Gaon… he makes the statement somewhere that the Vav is produced by… No, it’s not Saadia Gaon, it’s some other grammarian roughly from that period. I want to say it’s David Alfasi or somebody like this who makes the statement that the Vav sound is produced by pushing the lips together, and that’s then cited by many people saying, “Well, see, it was a ‘wuh’.” But you’re saying, “No, there’s a sound where the lips are pressed together, which is a ‘vuh’.” Is that right?
Dr. Kantor: Yeah.
Nehemia: I mean, not about David Alfasi, but in general.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, I mean, certainly. A sound by the two lips becoming very close, “vuh,” can definitely be a fricative sound as well as…
Nehemia: Meaning “vuh” as opposed to “wuh”. Okay.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. “Wuh”, “vuh”. I mean, they both involve both lips.
Nehemia: I think this also shows how close the two sounds are together, which explains why, as I understand, at least, in a number of languages there was a shift from “wuh” to “vuh”. And maybe vice versa, I don’t know, because they’re really similar sounds, right?
Dr. Kantor: And it happens in Latin as well. In some contexts, it happens in Greek. You see this happening in multiple languages around the same time because I mentioned earlier how there are certain diphthongs, where you have two vowels together in Greek, like “auo” or “auw”, that eventually became “auv”, and then “av”. So, things like that can happen.
And in Latin also, something which would have been like in ancient times, salwete, for “hello,” eventually becomes salvete. And so, you get these changes, and part of it might be because “wuh,” in addition to its phonetic name as labio velar approximant, it can also be just called a semivowel, because it’s like in between a consonant and a vowel. Which means it’s less salient, and so, sometimes in languages, depending on the contact situation they’re in, something that’s less salient…
Nehemia: What do you mean by less salient?
Dr. Kantor: Less notable, in a way. It’s easy to miss. Imagine between two words, like if I say something like pru u’rvu, where you just have a “uu”, or if it was in ancient…
Nehemia: “Be fruitful and multiply.”
Dr. Kantor: …frru warrvu, or something like that, the “wuh” would be easier to miss than if I changed that sound to a “vuh”. It’s easier to lose a “wuh” or a “yuh” in between vowels, things like that, whereas a “vuh” sound is going to be more strong. And so, sometimes, depending on the contact situation of languages, maybe that salience, that wanting a sound that’s stronger, or an assimilation… not like people make a decision about language change, but that speakers can “assimilate” one sound to another, and maybe the less salient goes to the more salient sometimes.
So, maybe that explains why it happens in multiple languages. I mean, I’m not an expert in the cross-linguistic patterns for “wuh” becoming vuh, but it definitely happens in a number of…
Nehemia: I think you probably are compared to most linguists, even. So, you mentioned something interesting; pru u’rvu. So, in Hebrew we have… This raises a different problem. You said one of the pieces of evidence in the Secunda for the “wuh,” I’m just thinking out loud here, is that it’s written as “oo” when it’s a conjunction, when it means “and”. But in Biblical Hebrew, as we understand it… from my understanding I should say, let’s be specific, we have a conjunction, meaning the word “and” that sometimes is “oo”. So, how do we know that… maybe originally it was always “oo”, and then sometimes it dissimilated into “vuh” and, but in the time of the Secunda, it was always…
Like, you mentioned the circle… So, my thought is the “oo” at the beginning of a word, which is a conjunction, is a bad example, or maybe a problematic example. I guess all examples are going to be problematic in some ways. Fair enough.
We’ll come back to this. I want to read what you wrote here.
Dr. Kantor: Sure.
Nehemia: You talk here about evidence from Mishnaic Hebrew that there were Jews who pronounced, or at least there were people who pronounced the letter Vav as a “vuh”.And the evidence I’m familiar with is, Bar-Asher brings us that Yavneh can be written with a Bet or with a Vav, sometimes two Vavs. Or avazim, geese, is with a Bet or two Vavs.
So, I’m going to play the devil’s advocate in favor of “wuh” here for a second. So, our evidence for Mishnaic Hebrew presumably comes from something like the Kaufmann Manuscript, which was written in the 10th or 11th century. I’m told by the experts in Talmudic studies that the Mishnah was entirely oral, or mostly oral, up until the 9th century. Maybe there was a copy here and there, but by and large it was oral. And then they decided to write it down, and then that became dominant. And even in the early 10th century, we have these statements about, “Well, you can’t really trust what’s in the manuscripts. It’s the people reciting orally that’s the reliable version.”
So, how do we know? In our manuscripts, it’s Yavne with a Vav orwith a Bet, or avasim with a Vav or a Bet, but maybe that’s a product of the 9th century when it was written down. How do we know? Do we know?
Dr. Kantor: So, yeah…
Nehemia: Maybe it’s a question for Bar-Asher, not for you, to be fair…
Dr. Kantor: So, this is one thing that makes texts that were transmitted very difficult to use for historical phonological reasons. I mean, you can if certain things become regular, and you can if you do reconstruct the earlier form of the text as having the same variant, then they can be. But like for all my work on the Greek things, Greek pronunciation, I only used things that were actually dated to the time of consideration. When you’re dealing with manuscripts, they…
Nehemia: So, when did John Chrysostom live? Help me out here. Like 4th or 5th century or something?
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nehemia: And all your manuscripts are from that period? You’re not dealing with like, 10th or 15th century manuscripts?
Dr. Kantor: So, I don’t use anything John Chrysostom for my Greek pronunciation stuff. The reason later manuscripts for something like the Secunda are fine is because there was no ongoing tradition that would interfere. You know what I mean?
Nehemia: Oh, right.
Dr. Kantor: The scribes who were copying it probably didn’t know much of what they were copying. Because you have a Greek scribe copying Chrysostom’s commentary, and then suddenly he sees a Hebrew word transcribed into Greek. He’s probably not going to go, “Oh, I pronounce this this way, so, let me change it.” Now, they do do that occasionally, actually. I should correct myself, because there are places where medieval scribes who did know something about Hebrew will even correct the quotations of the Secunda. But you can document this. And because we have so many different witnesses, and we have the ones here and in Milan, where you can establish certain phonological features that we can see now because we have it all, but scribes who are copying in the Middle Ages wouldn’t have known.
And so, you can tell when they’ve changed something, or you can tell when there are scribal errors. But you’re not going to get the same features of a living tradition interfering with the transmission of it like you do. Because, as Morag has shown, it’s such a common feature in Hebrew traditions for the pronunciation of the local languages to affect how things are transmitted in the reading tradition orally, but you just don’t have that with something like the Secunda in the same way. Occasionally you get it. People will change it, but there’s usually enough manuscript evidence to be like, “Oh! I got you. You changed that to look more like standard Hebrew!” But you’ve got to shift it back.
Nehemia: So, in any event, going back to, let’s say the 2nd or 3rd century. We have the Secunda people who are saying “wuh” for the letter Vav, and we have the Mishnah, apparently, based on what’s been argued in the evidence so far is they’re saying “vuh”. So, you have both traditions side by side, which you kind of said before, I guess. Okay. So, you have a diversity…
Dr. Kantor: Yeah. I mean, I think a better data point would be the Dead Sea Scrolls interchanges, Bet and Vav, because that’s older. I think it’s not super common, so you can’t argue that it was really widespread, but it’s definitely there. You have both side by side to some extent in the ancient period. The wind blowing around papers in here… and so, you have both in each in the ancient period to some degree.
But the question about the Mishnaic examples would be, just how early is it attested? And if it is attested in the manuscript tradition later, can we assume that it was also, part of it, an earlier stage of textual transmission? I mean, I think… there are other things like…
Nehemia: My favorite is when they write kivyachol with Vav.Which is this… I’m not getting into details, but it’s inherently a Bet. It’s the Bet, meaning “in”, and they write it with a Vav. But again, that’s in manuscripts that are from… not before the 9th century, because we don’t have earlier manuscripts than that.
Dr. Kantor: But you do get it in enough things like… certainly by the Byzantine period you have it in plenty of disparate works, like in Bereshit Rabbah you have plenty of examples of this. And the relationship between Hebrew phonology and Aramaic phonology is probably relevant for this change. And then you get it in Greek transcriptions, like where it becomes really obvious that Hebrew traditions have “vuh” is when in Greek transcriptions of the Byzantine period you see Vav transcribed with the Veta, instead of an Omicron-Ipsilon.
Nehemia: So, an example that comes to mind for me, and someone needs to trace this and track this down, maybe you’ve already done it, is in Josephus. He writes, “Levite”, something like Levitas, with an Upsilon, which you’re saying could be le’u’tas, right, meaning a “wuh”.
Dr. Kantor: Well, at Josephus’s time, it would probably be something almost in between, like le’wvui’tas, with that bilabial fricative, sort of a rounding of a labialization. So, le’wui’tas, le’vui’tas, something…
Nehemia: Oh, that’s a combination almost, I’m hearing. Wow.
Dr. Kantor: Exactly. So, if you listen for the “vuh”, you’re going to hear the “vuh”. If you listen for the “aewui”, you’re going to hear the “aewui”. That was right when it was changing.
Nehemia: Wow. So, but wow. But then David, he writes…
Dr. Kantor: But he might also just be continuing the Septuagint spelling too.
Nehemia: Right, that’s true. But then the name David, which is written with an Upsilon in the Septuagint, he writes with a Beta.
Dr. Kantor: In which manuscripts, though, is the question…
Nehemia: That’s the question. Because that’s something someone needs to track down. And I think I looked, and our earliest manuscript of Josephus anyway, is from the 9th century. So, who knows if that’s not a product of the scribe who’s copying it?
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, because that is a difficult one. Because that’s something that changes too, over time, is the spellings of “David” in Greek change over time, and scribes often update these things. One of the hardest things is that all these spellings get updated by scribes almost subconsciously. I did some research into how certain words are spelled in the Septuagint manuscripts over time, and we have certain fragments from Qumran, so you can go back as early as like 1st – 2nd century BC, or so, and map them out. We have more or less something from every century all the way to Vaticanus, and what you’ll find is that, in the same exact way that scribal patterns change in papyri and inscriptions outside of Bible manuscripts, you see them changing in exactly the same way in the Bible manuscripts.
And so, if a scribe wrote it this way in the, you know, 1st century BC when he’s writing a letter, and then it changed a few centuries later, you see that same exact thing mapped out in Septuagint manuscripts. So, it can be really hard to use that kind of data.
Nehemia: In other words, they were updating the language as they’re writing it, because just… okay.
Dr. Kantor: It’s just that’s how they write it.
Nehemia: Well, it’s like… I’ll take an analogy here, the King James Version, where there are some names that are written with an “I”, and almost nobody who prints it today is going to write it with an “I”, they’ll write it with a “J”.
Dr. Kantor: Oh, yeah. Exactly.
Nehemia: If it’s the name Jacob that was written with an “I”, they’re going to write it with a “J” because that’s just how it’s written. Now, maybe it was pronounced Jacob in the 17th century. I’m not an expert in 17th century English, but the spelling convention gets updated. So, that’s really interesting.
This has been an amazing conversation.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, I’ve enjoyed it.
Nehemia: Oh wow, this has been awesome. Any final thoughts about your research, about some of the things you’re doing? Tell people what you’re working on next. Of course, don’t give away any secrets that some other scholar might steal, but…
Dr. Kantor: Well, I can tell something that is about to come out, which I’ve been working on, so, it just finished. And I’m now extending into other areas, and that’s the relationship between all these Hebrew traditions linguistically. When we talk about Samaritan, Tiberian, Babylonian, Palestinian, if we could put these on a language tree, how do they all relate to each other? So, a book about that is about to come out, probably within the next month or so.
Nehemia: Before this will be broadcast.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, so it’ll be out. It’ll be called The Linguistic Classification of the Biblical Hebrew Reading Traditions of Phyla-and-Waves Model, with the Cambridge Semitic Languages and Culture series.
Nehemia: Oh, so it’ll be available to download for free online.
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, it’ll be available for free to download online.
Nehemia: Oh, beautiful. We’ll put up a link, and that’s really exciting. Just talk a few minutes about where people can find what you do. You’ve got some incredible stuff on YouTube. You have some stuff on Amazon, like for example, you’ve done some stuff on Codex Vaticanus we haven’t even talked about. Just give us some of the places where people can find… What are some of the other things you’ve done and where can people find it?
Dr. Kantor: Sure, sure. Of course, anything I’ve written you can find on a CV page of mine. This would actually be on my website too. So, for my online presence, you can either go to www.koinegreek.com, which will be the Greek things I do. And a lot of sort of living language speaking, ancient Greek resources, even short movies, films in ancient Greek, and various things, and reading practice and pronunciation things, which you mentioned. Codex Vaticanus, where it’s the New Testament section of Codex Vaticanus made cropped down so you can carry it in your hand like a book with verse references, a pseudo facsimile of that that you can use.
And then my other website for some of my Hebrew stuff that I do is www.biblicalhebrew.com, and there you’ll find actually a number of ancient languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian, and Ugaritic as spoken languages. Not a lot of material yet. I’m just starting there, so, a lot more time to fill that out.
Nehemia: So, if you want him to put up more stuff, go to those websites. Can they write to you through the website and nag you and ask you to put up more stuff?
Dr. Kantor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nehemia: He’s got some incredible stuff on Greek. All right, well, thank you so much for joining me. This has been an amazing conversation.
Dr. Kantor: Yes. Thank you. I really enjoyed it myself. Thank you.
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VERSES MENTIONED
Judges 12:5-6
BOOKS MENTIONED
The Pronunciation of New Testament Greek: Judeo-Palestinian Greek Phonology and Orthography from Alexander to Islam
by Benjamin Kantor
The Linguistic Classification of the Reading Traditions of Biblical Hebrew: A Phyla-and-Waves Model
by Benjamin Kantor
RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Support Team Study – Wow, It’s a Vav!
Support Team Study – Bible Vowels of Ancient Israel
Hebrew Voices #141 – When were the Hebrew Vowels Written Down
Support Team Study – The Vowels of the Aleppo Codex
OTHER LINKS
https://biblicalhebrew.com/
https://www.koinegreek.com/
(PDF) Recitation and Performance in Late Antique Hebrew: Linguistic Hints of a Performance Register in Greek and Latin Transcriptions of Biblical Hebrew from Late Antiquity (researchgate.net)
by Ben Kantor
THE SECOND COLUMN (SECUNDA) OF ORIGEN'S HEXAPLA IN LIGHT OF GREEK PRONUNCIATION
Dissertation by Ben Kantor
The LXX and Historical Greek Phonology: Orthography, Phonology, and Transcriptions | Benjamin P Kantor - Academia.edu
by Ben Kantor
The post Hebrew Voices #182 – The Man Who Taught His Children Ancient Greek: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.
