HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS, EDITORIAL THEORY, AND BIBLICAL HEBREW. THE CURRENT STATE OF THE DEBATE

The question of diachronic change in Biblical Hebrew has been extensively examined in recent years. This article has two parts. First, it reviews the current state of the debate in light of a special session devoted to the topic at the Society of Biblical Hebrew and National Association of Professors of Hebrew in 2015. Special attention is given to the diachrony of Biblical Hebrew in light of ancient Indo-European languages, statistical methods for historical linguistics and editorial theory. Second, it responds to a recent article of Rezetko (2016) concerning syntactic evidence for diachronic change in Qumran Hebrew (Naude & Miller-Naude 2016a) by providing additional evidence from the crosslinguistic negative cycle and the negation of participles in Hebrew.