Itching for some historical linguistics?

 I have two small-ish and probably pretty nerdy corrections to make about something I said in last week's sermon. I made two mistakes when I was talking about the Septuagint and the Hebrew language.

Mistake #1: I said that Hebrew had gone extinct at one point. That's not correct. Ancient Hebrew never went extinct because it, like Latin in Catholic Mass and Koine Greek in Bible translations, continued to be used, studied, and understood in certain religious contexts (including Bible translation). Because no one spoke it as a native language, but because many people learned it in a religious/educational context, it was a dead language, not extinct. (Click here for an article about Extinct vs Dead languages)

If it had ever fallen out of use in religious things, it would have gone extinct.

Mistake #2: Ironically, because I made this mistake ALSO, it made my ultimate point still valid and even a little MORE interesting now that we're clearing it up. I said the Septuagint was written in period of time when Hebrew was "merely a dead language..." That's not correct. The Septuagint was written between 300 and 100 BC, and Hebrew is generally thought to have died around 200 AD. Some scholars think it persisted even longer than that. 

Sorry for making both of those mistakes. Face Palm!

It turns out that the Septuagint was written in a time when Hebrew was still alive. It was on the decline, but it still had more than 400 years left in it, which is nothing to sneeze at. The point in the sermon was that the Septuagint gives us a unique window into the minds of 72 people who likely had Hebrew and Greek understanding that they DIDN'T have to learn in school like all of the Greek and Hebrew scholars we have today. The ultimate point in the sermon was still correct, fortunately.

Allow me to wax eloquent for a second about why that so interesting. When a person speaks a language natively, they can FEEL what things mean and when things are incorrect. Here's an example of a sentence that breaks a specific English rule. You almost certainly have never heard of the rule, but you will certainly be able to FEEL that it is broken. 

"Bob is the man who he delivers my mail."

What's the rule that the sentence is breaking? You don't even need to know what the rule is to feel that it's being broken. That's how native language works. (The rule is that you can only have one relative pronoun inside a relative clause, so the extra "he" is redundant). 

If you were speaking Arabic, however, you would HAVE TO put that second relative pronoun in there. That's just how that language works. If you speak both Arabic and English natively, you don't have to know either rule. You'll just naturally never break them.

Since Hebrew was still alive along with Koine Greek during the period when the Septuagint was written, scholars believe that it was written by people who had an understanding of both languages. In fact, there are Greek spellings that actually help us understand how certain ancient Hebrew words were pronounced. Hebrew famously didn't have vowels to show how words would be pronounced, but the Septuagint sounded many of the words out in Greek, giving us a glimpse into how those words were actually pronounced. 

The usefulness of an English Speaker reading the Septuagint is limited. However, I find myself often wanting to know what the Septuagint rendered for a certain word in the OT to see if it could shed some light on the Greek word in the NT. If you're ever doing a word study on a Greek word in the NT, you might find yourself wondering where that word shows up in the OT, and the Septuagint would be your option for finding it. Click here for a full inter-linear document of the Septuagint.

Alright my rant is over!