Amoraic Hebrew In The Light Of Ben Sira’s Linguistic Innovations

Abstract

We can divide the linguistic innovations in Ben Sira into two groups: (1) those that are common to Ben Sira and the later books of the Bible and/or the Dead Sea Scrolls and/or the Mishnaic literature and/or Aramaic; (2) those that are unique to Ben Sira. This chapter focuses exclusively on the linguistic innovations common to Ben Sira and Amoraic literature. It stress from the outset that these innovations appear in the latter quite independently and not as part of citations from, or within paraphrases of Ben Sira. According to Kutscher and Sokolof, Amoraic Hebrew continued the literary traditions of the dialects that preceded it, chiefly biblical and Tannaitic Hebrew. They also emphasized the prominent influence of Aramaic, the spoken vernacular of the Amoraim, on their Hebrew. Keywords: Amoraic Hebrew; Ben Sira; Dead Sea Scrolls; linguistic innovations; Mishnaic literature