How Old Is the Hebrew Bible?

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The Age of the Hebrew Bible is difficult to determine. Its books may contain strata and fragments composed in wholly different periods.

Many books are projected into a distant past, written down on the basis of oral traditions and cultural memory that may span centuries, with details revealing little about the age of the account. The history of ideas (e.g., monotheism), institutions (e.g., the monarchy, sacrifice, and festivals), or power struggles (e.g., priestly rivalries and anti-Samaritan polemics) might give useful hints—if it weren’t for the fact that most of these historical realities are supported exclusively by the biblical text itself.

Many scholars argue that we should drop the whole issue and concentrate only on the final form of the text or its reception. Isn’t the life of the Bible independent of its time of composition? Perhaps in many respects it is. But it is also shaped by its history, even as it shapes later history.

Its central narrative relates to tribal, national, and cultural history from end to end. Its history-like narrative is neither a parable nor an atemporal myth. If we could only place it in its historical context, even approximately, we would understand its nuanced meanings better. But this means taking on the challenge of dating the texts. So how do we date biblical texts?

In many cases the best evidence—sometimes the only evidence—is language. Language evolves; its sounds, semantics, and syntax change through time. This makes it possible, in theory, to determine a chronology for individual writings. Dating texts by their language is a well-established practice, if not always as precise as one could wish.

But as a result of the ever-growing necessity to specialize, linguistic dating has lately fallen into disuse among biblical scholars, allowing it to be caricatured and prematurely rejected. We, however, believe that historical research on the Hebrew language ought to be reestablished where it belongs: at the heart of biblical studies.¹ All languages change over time. Grammatical functions evolve, and new forms emerge. Anyone who has read old books has experienced this curious fact. When Shakespeare’s Hamlet says,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

we have no idea what he means. The words “quietus,” “bodkin,” and “fardel” have fallen out of English usage, and their meanings (“death,” “dagger,” and “burden”) are obscure to us. When Ophelia replies, “How does your honor for this many a day?” we understand the words but not the idiom (“How have you been lately?”), which means we do not understand.

Similarly, there is evidence that even well-educated Hebrew speakers in the fourth century B.C.E. and later did not correctly understand some of the words and idioms in the Hebrew Bible.

The study of language change is most effective when comparing linguistic features that can be contrasted as early and late. But even when many variations are understood well enough to be interpreted in chronological terms, the path from diachronic linguistics to the dating of texts is not a straight one. The presence of relatively early linguistic features does not automatically establish that a text is early, nor does the presence of relatively late features necessarily show that a text is late. Complicating factors, such as dialects, style, literary allusion, and professional jargon, must be taken into account.

What makes diachronic study possible is that the linguistic data line up in an extraordinary way, particularly in biblical prose texts, most of which represent the literary genre of historical (or “history-like”) narrative. Within this genre, the following two subsets of Hebrew stand out.

A small number of biblical books are dated to the Persian period or later by the events they recount: Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles, whose genealogies extend at least to the fourth century B.C.E. These same books are written in a particular type of Hebrew. Notably, their lexicon contains many words borrowed from Aramaic and several words borrowed from Persian, thus reflecting strong influence from the administrative language of the period.

The same type of Hebrew, commonly referred to as Late Biblical Hebrew, is found in Daniel and Ecclesiastes. The Book of Daniel is situated in the sixth century B.C.E., but has been unmasked as a writing of the Hellenistic age (mid-fourth to second centuries B.C.E.)059 because of its manifest allusions to the Maccabean wars. Ecclesiastes is fictively attributed to Solomon but is similarly recognized as one of the latest books of the Hebrew Bible.

In contrast, Classical Biblical Hebrew of the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) and Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) has relatively few Aramaic loanwords and practically no words of Persian origin. The difference is particularly clear when a word in the late books corresponds exactly to a different one in the earlier corpus: “letter,” ’iggeret (Hebrew: ) in Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles, replaces the native Hebrew word sefer (Hebrew: ) of Kings; “garden,” pardes (Hebrew: ) in Nehemiah and Ecclesiastes, is called gan (Hebrew: ) in Genesis and Kings. New words of foreign extraction replace earlier, indigenous words.

Another type of clue occurs when a word turns up with different meanings in the two corpora. The noun ḥefetz (Hebrew: ) means “desire” in Samuel and Kings, but “matter” or “thing” in Ecclesiastes. The second meaning derives from the first by a process of generalization.

The sheer density of features separating the two types of language makes it difficult to view them as mere style forms. The Late Biblical Hebrew features are typologically later than their classical counterparts: (1) Aramaic and Persian loanwords displace earlier Hebrew words; (2) the internal passive form recedes, and the external marking of verbs with prefixes takes over; and (3) the nonfinite forms—infinitives and participles—extend their functions to the detriment of the finite verb tenses.

Consequently, it is almost impossible to conceive of the two corpora of biblical texts in other than diachronic terms—the second following after the first. A single diachronic contrast has little value in determining the date of written texts: An early feature might figure in a late text or a late feature in an early text for any number of reasons. However, the systematic accumulation of relatively early features in the classical corpus and of relatively late features in the Late Biblical Hebrew corpus makes dialectal, stylistic, or literary explanations infeasible.

The conclusion must be that Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew do indeed reflect successive stages in the development of the language. In fact, the two corpora must have been produced at some temporal distance from one another for their language to have grown so far apart.

To sum up, Biblical Hebrew—like all languages, literary and spoken—has a history that we can trace, even among the variations due to textual transmission, dialects, and literary style. We are able to isolate two main phases or “chronolects” (time-specific language stages) of Biblical Hebrew—classical and late—as well as an intermediate phase, Transitional Biblical Hebrew.

So how do we date these individual stages of Biblical Hebrew? The similarities between Classical Hebrew and pre-exilic Hebrew inscriptions allow us to locate the historical context of Classical Hebrew in the pre-exilic period. The characteristics of Transitional Biblical Hebrew and the books written in it indicate that its historical context is the “long” sixth century B.C.E. (from the last few years of the Judaean monarchy to the first generation of returnees in the early Persian period). The various features of Late Biblical Hebrew—including the misinterpretation of older features that we call “pseudoclassicisms”—illuminate its context in the postexilic060 period. Linguists can establish a relative and absolute dating for these phases and describe their distinctive features, focusing on changes in grammar.

A variety of contemporary historical evidence outside the Bible—from the early Iron Age to the Greek era—supports this linguistic model of consecutive language phases. The strongest confirmations come from the realm of cultural history; they include glimpses of political institutions, foreign affairs, high culture, and ideology attested in extra-biblical texts or material culture and conveyed by casual details in the biblical text. These “tracks” of cultural history confirm that the distinctive phases of Hebrew are chronolects and indicate the ages of the Hebrew Bible over a thousand-year span.

The Age of the Hebrew Bible is difficult to determine. Its books may contain strata and fragments composed in wholly different periods.