The Use of the Participle in the Hebrew Bar Kosiba Letters in the Light of Aramaic

Abstract

Even though Simon Bar Kosiba's political ambitions were doomed to failure, he eventually seems to have revolutionized, albeit long post mortem, people's views on the linguistic situation in Palestine around the time of Christ. Earlier scholars usually believed that Hebrew as a living had died out completely soon after the Babylonian Exile; in 1960, however, the caves of Wadi Murabba'at, Nahal Hever and Nahal Seelim in the Judaean Desert yielded a number of letters either from himself or from his executives during the upheaval (132-135 CE).' Several of them are written not in Aramaic or Greek, but in a previously unknown variety of Hebrew; seven Hebrew letters have been preserved sufficiently well to permit a wider-ranging linguistic investigation. This discovery quickly brought about a change of the majority opinion towards an acceptance (by now almost unanimous) of the view that the use of Hebrew was not limited to learned circles, but that it was still a spoken language in that time-whatever the intrinsically vague term spoken language is in fact supposed to mean.2 Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Aramaic became very much dominant and thereby also exercised a growing influence on Hebrew from the fifth century BCE onwards. This has by now been shown in great detail with respect to morphology and lexicon.3