An Alternative Approach to the Lexicon of Late Biblical Hebrew

What it is about

A variationist answer to Hurvitz's Concise Lexicon of Late Biblical Hebrew (2014), which lists 80 late words with their early equivalents (e.g. מַלְכוּת for מַמְלָכָה "kingdom") and dates texts by counting late items, each weighing 1. The authors count, in eleven transitional and late books (Ezekiel to Chronicles, with Chronicles split into synoptic and non-synoptic parts), every late variant together with its early alternatives, using ETCBC data and publishing the data and Python/R scripts. They plot per book the absolute counts, the late fraction of each variable, and how widely each variant is spread across books, and read the results against an S-curve of replacement. Result: late variants are rare and idiosyncratic, early variants persist strongly in late books, full replacement almost never happens within a book and never for the corpus, and late books differ much from each other. So a count of late words says little about date, and absence of late words does not prove earliness (e.g. "fast" is still צוֹם in late books; תַּעֲנִית occurs once).

Ideas

• I1. Treat diachronic markers as variables, not lists: for each early/late pair, report counts of both variants and the late fraction per book, never a bare count of late items. For the Torah this gives a baseline: the late fraction should be near zero; any exception is worth a note.
• I2. Use the method in the stages chapter: pick a handful of variables with Mishnaic outcomes (אֲנִי/אָנֹכִי, אֲשֶׁר/שֶׁ־, מַמְלָכָה/מַלְכוּת, the long and short pronoun suffixes) and show per Torah book the share of each variant, with dates.
• I3. Publish the counting as a small deterministic tool with its data table, so every number in the chapter can be recomputed (the paper's open spreadsheet as a model).

For Mova

I1–I3 belong in 12. Biblical, Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew compared (the stages compared, the dating debate, counts book by book) and 11-mishnaic.md; the counts come from the lemmas in our trees, by a Rust command beside macula dict. The paper also argues for caution in any claim that a feature "dates" a text, which the chapter should state.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5508/jhs.2016.v16.1

@article{rezetko2016alternative,
  title = {{An Alternative Approach to the Lexicon of Late Biblical Hebrew}},
  author = {Rezetko, Robert and Naaijer, Martijn},
  journal = {Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 16},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.5508/jhs.2016.v16.1},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs.2016.v16.1}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2016-rezetko-alternative-approach-lexicon-late-biblical/