Language and preconceptions.

I finished my thesis last Thursday!  And it was approved by my advisor! So I'm that much closer to my second master's degree.

For today, something that isn't my thesis.

Yesterday after Ulpan Hebrew, one of my classmates asked me if the Ten Commandments were given in Aramaic.  And I shrugged my shoulders and said, well, they're written in Hebrew, and that's the only form we have them in.

But more important, I think, is the question or assumptions behind her question.  She's a scholar, I think she has a PhD, and she's leaving Sunday to travel around Europe giving talks on Ladino, the Hebrew/Spanish/Latinate creole of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula (similar to the Hebrew/Germanic/Slavic Yiddish of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe).  So her specialty is Medieval, not ancient Jews.

There's this long assumption, and because of its history, it's the one in popular culture/non-specialist academics, that Hebrew was mostly a written language and Aramaic was the spoken one.

There are two problems with this assumption.  One, Aramaic and Hebrew are different languages.  And it's not like Latin to French, it's more like Spanish to French.  Both are Western Semitic languages which developed in parallel, not one from the other.

The second is that Hebrew must have functioned like Latin in the late Medieval church, because even though the Mishnah and the early Midrashim are written in Hebrew, it's a different Hebrew from the Bible, so it must be a corrupted version, like Medieval Latin was to Classical Latin, and the rabbis were obviously speaking Aramaic.  This assumption, I shouldn't have to point out, comes from Christian scholars in the 19th century.  I usually do have to point out, however, that these Christian scholars were by and large either straight-up anti-Semitic, or more casually anti-Jewish.  Underlying either stance is the unquestioned assumption that Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple was a dead religion, dry and legalistic, with no spirituality, non-life-giving, and abandoned by its God.  It's also worth pointing out that many Jews from the 19th and early 20th centuries who trained in European, and therefore Gentile, Christian universities adopted and perpetuated some of these assumptions because they were the accepted scholarly opinions of the day.

In 1947, the caves at Qumran were discovered, and eventually the thousands of manuscript fragments there gave quite a different picture.  Most of them are written in Hebrew, and it is a Hebrew that is obviously a spoken, living language, one that is used for letters, scriptural commentary, poem and prayer composition, and speculative theology.  Also discovered in wadis in the Dead Sea area were the Bar Kokhba letters and the Babatha Archive.  While the Babatha Archive is mostly in Greek, the Bar Kokhba letters are in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew, and these are not religious but political documents.  Together with the scrolls from the Qumran sect, these documents show the Hebrew was, in fact, a living, spoken language, well into the second century CE, and that Mishnaic Hebrew, far from being a corrupted memory of a dead "liturgical" language, was instead probably the language the rabbis were actually speaking when they composed their texts.

It is true that eventually, later in the third and fourth centuries, Aramaic did apparently become the main language, as the later Midrashim and the Yerushalmi (Palestinian/Jerusalem Talmud) are written in Palestinian Aramaic, not Hebrew.  But there doesn't appear to be any historical evidence backing up the old assumption that by the Second Temple period, Hebrew had already faded into a barely remembered "liturgical" language.