Went to various Wikipeadia articles.
Actually there is a running debate among modern scholars about exactly how dead Hebrew was in Jesus's time.
In the earlier 20th Century scholars thought Hebrew had died out outside of being a liturgical language at the start of the Hellenistic period ( After Alexander the Great conquered the whole Mideast) circa 300 BC.
Nowadays some say it didnt die out until the end of the Roman period around 200 AD.
There seems to have been a deliberate effort to revive Hebrew during the surge of nationalism that led to the Bar Kohba Revolt against Rome - which ended with Rome beating the Crap out of Judea, and starting the Jewish diaspora.
But in the main I seem to be right that in Jesus' time most working class Judeans, including Jesus, probably spoke their local dialect of Aramaic, and did not speak Hebrew everyday. And that Hebrew had been in decline for a long time.
This is what got me started on this subject:
Some TV doc said that the modern Ashkenazi Jews (the largest ethnic subdivision of modern Jews) are called that because "'Ashkenazi' is the Hebrew word for 'Germany'". What bothered me is how could the ancient Hebrews have had a word for a place beyond the Alps in Europe that they couldnt have known even existed? Germany was an unknown King David as America was.
But it turns out that the European Jews of the Middle Ages would use Hebrew names from the Bible for then contemporary places they were living in Europe (Spain was called Sepharim, Bohemia was called "Canaan", and Germany became "Ashkenaz" which was a place in Syria known to the ancient Hebrews). So "Muscovy" might be a Hebrew word after all.
06 Mar 2016, 7:11 pm
