If you started by reading Beowulf, then moved on to (say) Chaucer, then Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantics and so on finally up to contemporary writing, you would have experienced from start to finish a quantum linguistic shift (I always like to get the Q word in if I can, even if you don't use it accurately it makes you sound clued up)
It's the same with Greek. Homer> classical Attic >NT>modern; there's an enormous difference.
The OT covers a longer time-span than either of those examples, but as you read it, it all sounds linguistically/stylistically pretty much the same.
Is that because the translation is masking the differences, or does the Hebrew really have that amount of homogeneity? Thanks!
It's the same with Greek. Homer> classical Attic >NT>modern; there's an enormous difference.
The OT covers a longer time-span than either of those examples, but as you read it, it all sounds linguistically/stylistically pretty much the same.
Is that because the translation is masking the differences, or does the Hebrew really have that amount of homogeneity? Thanks!