Israelian Hebrew

Although IH is not a new proposal, it only started gaining ground as a challenge to older arguments to late dates for some biblical texts since about a decade before the turn of the 21st century: linguistic variation in the Hebrew Bible might be better explained by synchronic rather than diachronic linguistics, meaning various biblical texts could be significantly older than many 20th century scholars supposed.

It is known that the Kingdom of Judah (from which name the Jewish people are known), suffered a defeat at the hands of the Aramaic speaking neo-Babylonian Empire,[1] which involved deportation according to standard Babylonian practice.

What the IH proposal explains, which LBH does not, is the Aramaisms (and other features) that appear in texts that many scholars would consider antedated the period of exile in Babylon.

The assumed proto-Semitic phoneme ṯ̣ [θʼ] shifts to ṣ [sʼ] in standard biblical Hebrew (SBH), but to ṭ [tʼ] in Aramaic.

[4] Nominalization of verbs (the paradigm example being qātal, קטל) by forming a feminine nomen actionis (qətîlāh, קטלה) is common in MH, but rare in SBH.

SBH utilises the status constructus, typical of many Afroasiatic and especially Semitic languages, to indicate a genitive case relationship between nouns.

[clarification needed] An example of the SBH form of exactly the same phrase bəne Gil`ad (בני גלעד) can be found in Numbers 26:30, without the masculine plural suffix –im (as in cherub/–im, seraph/–im, kibbutz/–im).

This grammatical device is common in Mishnaic Hebrew (MH) and Syriac, which are of relatively late dates; but the contexts could also suggest northern settings, influencing the phraseology.

[5] A number of words have uneven distribution in the MT of the Hebrew Bible, if the indicators above (and internal evidence from the semantics of the texts) are used to identify which portions may have Israelite provenance.

The IH hypothesis identifies a number of linguistic features which are irregular in biblical Hebrew, but standard in the languages of her northern neighbours, or in MH (which clearly postdates the Bible, since it quotes it).