פרשת כינויי הגוף לנסתר ונסתרת ושאלת טיבם ההיסטורי של שרידי העברית הכתובה מימי בית שני מתוך השוואה לערבית המדוברת במרחב הפלסטיני

In this interdisciplinary article, we rely on insights from the study of modern Arabic diglossia in general and of the Palestinian Arabic dialects in particular, to shed light on the history of Hebrew. The discussion of the historical essence of Hebrew has been at the center of an intensive debate. The main dispute is between supporters of the “traditional” philological approach, who claim that it is possible to draw a historical picture of linguistic development, and the “revisionists” who seek to challenge the very possibility of drawing such a picture. Using Marc Bloch’s historical method, this article combines historical discussion with synchronic observation. Our premise is that despite many differences between the ancient and modern periods, there are also aspects of similarity that can be compared in order to understand the ancient historical processes. Among the central aspects of this comparison are the following features: similarly polyglot communities; social milieus allowing language contact between close Semitic languages; the possibility of describing the dialects according to geographical, social and ethnic aspects; and a diglottic continuum between canonical language and colloquial varieties. We illustrate this comparative method by examining one concrete linguistic question—the formation of 3ms and 3fs pronouns. The challenge regarding the ancient Hebrew forms of these pronouns has been how to explain the fact that in the Hebrew of Qumran, the forms are הואה/היאה , which seem typologically more archaic than the forms that appear in Biblical Hebrew ( הוא/היא ). We show that this difficulty exists only to the extent that we assume a uniform and continuous historical developmental line for the Hebrew language. Comparison with the Modern Arabic Palestinian dialects enables us to understand that these features of written Hebrew are actually only a few remnants of a wide range of dialects that characterized the ancient period.