ANELC 2021 e-lecture 1: The Canaanite Melting Pot

ANELC is a joint King's College London-UCL series.

Lecture by Ohad Cohen (University of Haifa)

Both the positivist and the relativist approaches to the study of Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH) posit the textual and the linguistic argumentation as the point of departure for the analysis, asking how (in the positivist case) and if (in the relativist case) we can characterize the historical background underlying these phenomena. In my talk I would like to propose that this question should be approached from a different direction. Namely, the analysis of the historical background should be the starting point. Until about three decades ago, the historical evidence from the southern administrative unit in the land of Israel, ‘Idumea’,

was relatively limited. The discovery of about 2,000 ostraca from this administrative unit in the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century has significantly altered our historical understanding of daily life in this area during the Persian period (538 - 332 BC). These ostraca allow us to glimpse the complex linguistic strata in this geographical expanse and historical period. The texts contain a variety of proper names of the people who lived in Idumea during the Persian period, pointing to a multinational and multilingual situation that stands in a sharp contrast to the administrative language of the ostraca themselves (written in official Aramaic). The lecture focuses on the linguistic inquiry into the different languages that are threaded together by these proper names as evidence of the melting pot of spoken tongues in this area. I will conclude my talk by contemplating on the theoretical implications of the historical and linguistic situation of ‘languages in contact’ in general and the ‘Canaanite melting pot’ in particular to the understanding of LBH.