Biblical grammar enters the culture wars

As a school child, I hated dikduk – biblical grammar.

I remember the head-scratcher Ms. Korach taught us about personal pronouns. “She” in Hebrew is he. And “he” in Hebrew is hu. But, sometimes, Ms. Korach explained, the same letters always used to write hu – heh, vav, aleph, could be used to spell the feminine he, violating every spelling rule she had taught us. And, to boot, she told us, this unusual spelling of the feminine pronoun he as if it were hu is found only in the Torah. To me it sounded like Abbott and Costello: She was he, and he was who, except when she was who, too. And who in the world could explain that?

Well, Aaron Hornkohl can. Hornkohl is a professor of ancient Hebrew at Cambridge and he loves dikduk. He’s an expert in historical linguistics, the study of how languages change over time. Scholars like Prof. Hornkohl identify differences between the Hebrew found in the former prophets – early biblical Hebrew – and the Hebrew found in the books of the post-exilic era, such as Ezra, Nehemiah Chronicles and Esther. For example, the name “David” in early biblical Hebrew is almost always spelled with consonants alone – dvd. However, in post-exilic works it is almost always spelled with a vowel; something like dvid, because this form of spelling (called plene spelling, or ktiv male) is much more prevalent in the post-exilic books.

There are many hundreds of markers of the difference between early biblical Hebrew and late biblical Hebrew, and they help us date the authorship of the books. Hornkohl’s new book about the development of biblical Hebrew plumbs the most arcane minutiae of biblical grammar and is written for specialists. But his conclusion has the potential to challenge theories about the origins of the Torah widely held in the academy and therefore in our wider cultural discourse.

A few words of background: The liberal and secular movements of the 1960s posed significant challenges to traditional authority and norms. Critical approaches to the Bible, reflecting broader trends in the humanities, sought to expose its hidden power dynamics, biases, and subtexts. Scholars debating the Torah – the five books of Moses – focused on three central questions:

1. Unity vs. Inconsistency: Was the Torah riddled with contradictions, or could its passages be understood as unified?
2. Historicity: Did the Torah’s narratives lack historical grounding, or were they rooted in real events?
3. Chronology: Was the Torah written long after other biblical books, or was it the Bible’s earliest collection?

In each case, arguments that seemed to undermine the Torah’s authority – by highlighting inconsistencies, denying historical foundations, or asserting late composition – aligned with the prevailing “hermeneutic of suspicion” and were often celebrated. Conversely, arguments for the Torah’s unity, historicity, or early composition risked being dismissed as religious apologetics rather than legitimate scholarship. This created uneven evidentiary standards: far less proof was required to argue for a late date for the Torah than for an early one.

In his new book, Hornkohl maintains that the Torah displays the earliest linguistic profile of any of the books of the Hebrew Bible and that this is evident in hundreds of places across its five books. One of his examples concerns the oddity Ms. Korach taught us in day school. It turns out that evidence from comparative Semitic linguistics and typological language patterns can explain how the feminine pronoun he, could come to have two spellings. But why only in the Torah? By the time the later books were written, only the familiar form for he (heh yod aleph) survived. And although these later scribes knew only that form of the word, they may have hesitated to “correct” what they perceived as an anomaly in the Torah because of the great reverence they held for it.

If Hornkohl is correct that the Torah uniquely preserves so many pre-monarchic linguistic features and presents a linguistic profile that is earlier than that found in the other books of the Hebrew Bible, the question stands: could that implicitly suggest that the Torah is the earliest of the Bible’s compositions? This flies in the face of what many Bible scholars today believe. Moreover, it touches on the hot-button question of chronology, as arguments for an early date for the Torah are often viewed with suspicion because they are thought to reflect a religious bias seeking to buttress the Torah’s authority. Nothing in Prof. Hornkohl’s prolific output to date would lead one to suspect him of such a bias.

Some dismiss the work of historical linguists like Hornkohl, arguing that we cannot determine the relative composition date of a biblical book based on language. They contend that an author from a later period could easily mimic an earlier style to lend their work an air of antiquity and authenticity.

However, the truth is that writers from later periods inevitably betray the language of their own time. They unintentionally slip in modern expressions and stylistic nuances – not occasionally, but pervasively and unmistakably. To grasp this, let’s set aside aleph and bet for a moment and talk about English. Imagine you’re writing a novel set in the 1970s and you want your characters to sound authentic to that era. This would demand a fine-tuned sensitivity to language. For example, if a character were to say, “The sound system in the nightclub was just awesome!” you’d be glaringly off the mark. A 1970s character would have said, “The Hi-Fi system in the discotheque was just groovy!”

Yet the challenge goes beyond iconic slang. Even subtle shifts in diction are difficult to replicate. For instance, if your character says, “I am really tired,” in the 1970s this would likely have been expressed as, “I really am tired.” Over the past fifty years “really” has moved from more frequently emphasizing the verb (“am”) to modifying the adjective (“tired”). Or consider this: “I’ve got a station wagon. I would recommend buying one, too.” While invoking the Brady Bunch-era vehicle might seem era-appropriate, both “I’ve got” and “recommend buying” reflect more recent linguistic preferences. A truly 1970s character would have said, “I have a station wagon. I would recommend to you to buy one also.”

As someone who lived through the 1970s, I can assure you: none of us would have consciously remembered such minute differences – and even if armed with a comprehensive guide, most modern readers wouldn’t notice the discrepancies. These are the subtleties that historical linguists like Hornkohl detect after painstaking analysis of vast data sets, not the kinds of things that leap out to the average person.

Biblical studies was right to liberate itself from the obligation of defending tradition. Yet, in doing so it has developed its own traditions of interpretation and accepted doctrine. The rigor of historical linguistics offers a necessary corrective, ensuring the discipline does not simply replace traditional orthodoxy with an orthodoxy of its own making.