The second pillar of DH is that JEDP all have different styles and language. This, says DH, is because having been created at different times, they used different words. It’s called language layering; because the words purportedly reflect foreign influences, it is also called mischsprache. When you find a word that did not exist before the Babylonian Captivity, the text you find it in must belong to P.
But how do you prove that it didn’t exist before the Babylonian captivity?
This goes back a long time to my discussion about archaeological evidence. Not only don’t we have archaeological evidence of all the texts produced in Hebrew, once it had its own writing system, we only have two up until the time of Qumran. One is from the 800s BCE; the other is from right before the Babylonian Captivity. Only the latter reproduces text known from Torah.
That’s not enough to prove that some words didn’t exist before the Babylonian Captivity. It’s barely enough to prove that some words did exist before the Babylonian Captivity. It’s the same concept I talked about in the last section about dictionaries of classical Greek not having words for certain things.
What does the mischsprache concept say and how does it compare to the 21st century understanding of Semitic languages, which I referred to in the previous section of the blog?
One important work on the mischsprache concept for Hebrew, is Bauer and Leander’s book from 1922. Bauer and Leander give a graphic which shows shows Hebrew and Akkadian on one side as siblings, and Phoenician on another side with Aramaic and Arabic as its siblings, depicted as younger cousins of Akkadian and Hebrew.
B&L claimed that the earliest evidence of a separate language for Jews is Mishnah when it is in pre-Captivity Tannakh. Kings II 18:26 clearly indicates that there was a Jewish language separate from Aramaic, but it is called yehudit, “Jewish”; Bauer and Leander were looking for the word ivrit, “Hebrew.” They were under the mistaken impression that the Hapiru were the ancestors of the Jews, an issue settled late in the 20th century.
B&L considered Arabia the home of the Semitic languages and then asked how the Semitic languages could have gotten there from the north. Get there from what place exactly? They rejected Mesopotamia as the source.
B&L didn’t realize that after the Gutians took over in Mesopotamia, the west was left to its own devices for centuries, during which both Canaanite and Hebrew developed.
Modern genetics tells the story. The Semitic languages originated in northeastern Anatolia between the Caucasus and Lake Van. This happened between 5000 and 3500 BCE. Archaeology shows that Akkadian used the Sumerian writing system, which developed by 3500 BCE. The oldest surviving Akkadian texts appeared by 2600 BCE and so (cultura non facit saltus) the Akkadian language existed for centuries before that. After 2350 BCE, when Naram-Sin’s homeland was conquered by the Indo-European Gutians, Semitic speakers in the west went their own way and developed Ugaritic, Canaanitic, Hebrew, and Aramaic.
Since the language pillar of DH is based on outdated information, it can’t serve as evidence that DH is true, more evidence that DH is a Linda problem.
The DH argument about words not existing at a given point in time, is only a version of the argument from silence which, as you know, is false unless you can show you have a complete dataset. So here is our first fallacy, and since it is used to claim that the four documents exist at all, the probability that DH is true, is zero.
There is one chance to rehabilitate this pillar and I’ll discuss it next week.© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved