Rosén Haiim B. Hebrew at the Crossroads of Cultures: From Outgoing Antiquity to the Middle Ages

Peeters Publishers, 1995. — 89 p. — (Orbis, Supplementa 3).The contacts between Hebrew and languages with which its speakers (or, at certain periods, rather its users) established cultural relations are not at all a new subject of study. I for my part have attempted to make contributions to that field on a few occasions, mainly in my monograph L'hebreu et ses rapports avec le monde classique (Paris, Geuthner, 1979) and in my study of "Die Sprachsituation im romischen Palastina", included in the proceedings of a colloquium held at Bonn in 1974, Die Sprachen im Romischen Reich der Kaiserzeit (= Beihefte der Bonner Jahrbiicher, vol. 40, 1980), pp. 215-239. As the titles of these publications indicate, they concentrate on the aspects of the contacts with Greek and Latin at the two most abundantly treated periods of 'influences' undergone by Hebrew, or, as the case may be, those exerted by Hebrew on other languages: the pre-Classical period, in which the civilisatory lexicon of Greek was enriched by a language almost identical with, or very closely related to, pre-Biblical Hebrew, and the period of the creation of the language types commonly called Biblical and New Testament Greek, the texts of which cannot be adequately interpreted without taking into account their Hebrew and Aramaic background. Another period on which scholarly attention is now focussing more and more, and which we have not lost sight of either, is that of the Hebrew Renaissance, emerging on the basis of the non-Semitic mother-tongues of the creators of the National Home in Palestine and the State of Israel.