Tuesday, May 28th @ 3 PM, Harper 103

Language Contact, the Ancient Near East, and the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: Bringing Data and Theory Together

While the phenomenon of language contact in the ancient Near East generally and the Hebrew Bible (also called the Old Testament) specifically has long been acknowledged, only recently have Semitic linguists and philologists begun to ask more theoretical questions about contact-induced changes. Biblical scholars have been even slower to engage in Contact Linguistics, despite the fact that the theoretical work in Language Contact can greatly enhance our understanding of how and why Mesopotamian traditions came into the biblical texts. In this paper, I will begin with some examples of language contact in ancient Mesopotamia in order to show some of the problems faced when asking sociolinguistic questions of this data set. I will then focus on Akkadian-Aramaic contact in the Iron Age II (roughly 1000 BCE-586 BCE), Neo-Babylonian (586 BCE-537 BCE), and Persian (537 BCE-330 BCE) periods (the dates are approximate to their relevance for Levantine history). Finally, I will use this information to set the socio-historical background for language contact between biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Akkadian.