The field of Second Language Acquisition has long since reached consensus that the most effective way to teach a foreign language is through “Communicative Methods” that immerse students in the language as soon and as fully as possible, requiring them to hear and speak—not translate—the new language. Are there lessons from this we can learn for teaching classical languages such as Greek and Hebrew? Below is an edited transcript of a panel sponsored by the National Association of Professors of Hebrew at the 2017 conference of the Society of Biblical Literature. The publication of Paul Overland’s textbook, Learning Biblical Hebrew Interactively (2016), provided the occasion for a group of Hebrew language instructors to reflect together on the challenges and possibilities of Second Language Acquisition communicative methods for teaching Biblical Hebrew.
The question of whether or not biblical texts can be dated chronologically remains a lively topic of debate, and one important part of the conversation is the use of loanwords for dating biblical texts. This paper examines the philological relationship between lexical borrowings and the date of biblical texts. By focusing on the Hebrew Bible’s non-Semitic vocabulary, it argues that loanwords both cannot and can be used to date biblical traditions. Negatively, there is no clear one-to-one correspondence between a loanword of a given type and the date of a biblical text. Positively, loanwords can be useful for dating biblical texts in certain circumstances: first, the relative number and type of loanwords can point to plausible historical circumstances of borrowing, and second, phonological and morphological features can establish an approximate terminus ante quem for the borrowing.
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