Mishnaic Hebrew

[TimV]

On another thread dealing with whether or not Aramaic and Hebrew were dialects of each other, support for this theory was given by a citation from F.F. Bruce in his NICNT commentary on Acts (Revised) In distinguishing between the two parties,, says of the Jews,

..the Hebrews spoke Aramaic (or Mishnaic Hebrew) and attended synagogues where the service was conducted in Hebrew. (p.120)

As one of my favorite hobbies is languages, that quote bothered me, as it goes against what I though I'd learned about the subject of which languages were spoken in Palestine during the time of Christ. So I asked a friend, Dr. Andrew Mathis of Villanova University, and he said

While I know Wikipedia is not the best possible source, note that Hebrew (a Canaanite language) and Aramaic are in different subdivisions. The other Canaanite languages are all dead languages, but I've seen enough of them (particularly in recent commentaries I've read) to see that they're related but unlike Hebrew in most ways.

That being said, there are numerous loan words from Hebrew into Judeo-Aramaic and back again.

But we also know that Jesus spoke Aramaic in the Galilee, whereas Hebrew was probably more spoken in Judea. Neither language was being spoken as much as Greek, however. In fact, I seem to recall that Hebrew was pretty much strictly a liturgical language after the Babylonian Captivity... I don't see much indicating that Aramaic and Hebrew are the same in any dialectic way. I think the guy you're debating is seeing the parenthetical phrase "(or Mishnaic Hebrew)" as an indication that it's a synonym for Palestinian Aramaic. It isn't.

Upon looking into the subject further, I think Bruce must be confusing Mishnaic Hebrew with Amoric Hebrew. "Amoric" and "Amaraic" look much the same, but have different meanings. Amoric is a form of Hebrew taught by amora i.e. a class of teachers.

Palestine at the time was quadralingual, with Latin, Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew spoken by different demographics. None of these languages are dialects of each other. Hebrew and Aramaic have about the same relation as Latin and Greek.

Hebrew was mainly a liturgical language, and varied some over the centuries just like English. The language of the Jew was in no area Hebrew, but varied by where the Jews lived, just like today, with the average Iranian Jew having spoken Parsi for the last few thousand years, American Jews speaking English, Russian Jews speaking Yiddish or Russian, etc...but all of them having access to books written in Hebrew and scholars among them who speak Hebrew.