10. The Ever-Changing Influx of New Words in Hebrew Scriptures

The Ever-Changing Influx of New Words in Hebrew Scriptures

Now, if the Biblical history be true, we shall expect to find Babylonian words in the early chapters of Genesis and Egyptian in the later; and so on down, an ever-changing influx of new words from the languages of the ever-changing dominating powers. And, as a matter of fact, this is exactly what we find. The accounts of the Creation and the Flood are marked by Babylonian words and ideas. The record of Joseph is tinged with an Egyptian coloring. The language of Solomon’s time has Indian, Assyrian, and probably Hittite words. From his time to the end of the Old Testament, Assyrian and Babylonian terms are often found, as in Jeremiah, Nahum, Isaiah, Kings, and other books. Persian words come in first with the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus and are frequent in Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles, and Esther, and, in the case of proper names, one at least occurs in both Haggai and Zechariah. No Greek words are to be found in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, except Javan and possibly one or two other terms. That Aramaic words may have been in Hebrew documents at any time from Moses to Ezra is shown by the fact that two or more words and phrases found elsewhere only in Aramaic occur already in the Tel-el-Amarna letters, and one in a letter to the king of Egypt from Abd-Hiba of Jerusalem.

It may be known to the reader that one verse in Jeremiah and about half of the books of Ezra and Daniel are written in Aramaic. This is what we might have expected at a time when, as the Egyptian papyri and the Babylonian indorsements show, the Aramaic language had become the common language of Western Asia and in particular of the Jews, at least in all matters of business and commerce. That the Hebrew parts of Daniel and Ezra should have a large number of Aramaic words would, therefore, be expected; and, also, they would naturally be found in Chronicles and Nehemiah and other documents coming from the latter part of the sixth century (when Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Persian empire) and in other works down to the latest composition of the Old Testament. In later Hebrew this process of absorbing foreign words may be illustrated by numerous examples. Thus the tract Yoma, written about A.D. 200, has about twenty Greek words in it, and Pesahim, about fourteen, while hundreds of them are found in Dalman’s dictionary of New Hebrew. Many terms of Latin origin also appear in the Hebrew literature of Roman times.