Re: [TIED] Hebrew and Arabic

I too find it highly unlikely that Hebrew and Arabic split about 600BCE. As Mark says, Hebrew was virtually a dead language by this date, and Arabic had yet to be born.

What I mean by that, is that prior to the Quran, one cannot speak of an Arabic language, just a collection of Arabian dialects spoken by the various tribes.

Arabic is said to be very conservative, so the resemblances probably go way back to common proto-Semitic. In addition, Jews were very active in western Arabia before Islam. In fact, three of the five tribes settled in Medina at the time of the Prophet's migration were Jewish. Muhammad went there to mediate in a feud between the two non-Jewish tribes. Much of the Quran must come from Jewish sources. And of course, Abraham's child by Hagar, Ismail is the legendary father of the Arabs. There were also various ephemeral client states that arose on the borders of the Fertile Crescent and the great Syrian desert, and many trading links. So all in all, there are many possible reasons for the resemblances in the languages and parallels in names.

I always understood Hebrew to be virtually identical to Phoenician. So, whatever one's view of pre-exile Israelite history, it seems pretty certain that Hebrew was one of the languages spoken in the Levant in the first half of the 1st millennium.

Cheers

Dennis

----- Original Message -----

From: Marc Verhaegen

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Sunday, 14 May, 2000 4:40 AM

Subject: Re: [TIED] Hebrew and Arabic

Nothing of the Old Testament has to be dismissed, only re-interpreted. You have to read Salibi I think. Rather convincing IMO. --Marc

There is a theory, not unlikely IMO, based on remarkable resemblances between biblical names & W.Arabian geographical names, that the Jews originally lived in western Arabia, were deported to Assyria & Babylonia (8th-6th cent.BC), not from Israel but from W.Arabia, and later"came back", not to W.Arabia but to Israel. If that is true, Hebrew & Arabic split ca.2600 years ago. Kamal Salibi 1985 "Het ware land van Abraham" Elsevier Netherlands (I don't know the origin German title, Rowohlt Verlag, 1985).

No, no, no. Highly unlikely, absurd. You have to dismiss much of the Old Testament as a forgery on grounds that would require you toss Homer and Hesiod onto the bonfire too.

Mark.

Hebrew, as a living language, was essentially extinct by the end of the Exile, and had been supplanted by Aramaic (the chancery language of the Persians). Before the Exile, it was probably little more than the official court dialect. Aramaic displaced just about everything until the advent of Greek, and finally, Arabic.