Editor’s note:
The following is an excerpt from an early draft of a chapter on the history of linguistics in biblical studies. Because of word count issues and the priorities falling from the nature of the audience, my larger thesis about the nature of interdisciplinary work in biblical studies founds its way to the cutting room floor. This material, however, remains important in helping us explore how linguistics functions the way it does for biblical scholars. I hope to explore these ideas here on Koine-Greek.com as I attempt to make various portions of cut material available to readers.

Everything asserted here is intended as historical description and not criticism or judgment. Nevertheless, there are certainly consequences for (1) how the history of linguistics in biblical studies has played out and (2) the particular difficulty of interdisciplinary research for students who find themselves interested in more advanced language study. In my own work in writing grammatical resources designed specifically for Bible translation, I continue to think hard about how the needs of the global community diverge dramatically from traditional biblical studies.

Linguistics in biblical studies as interdisciplinary

Sacred texts, the central focus of biblical studies, obligate us to think about the nature of language. For biblical scholars this means a diverse set of books in different languages whose composition spans centuries: Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek. The pursuit of understanding these sacred texts, the pursuit of their meaning, under-girds the history of biblical scholarship’s engagement with linguistics over the past 100 years.

Biblical languages are natural languages. Their realization in these ancient texts necessarily involves all aspects of linguistic structure: phonology, prosody, word-formation and morphology, syntax, discourse, lexicon, pragmatics. Yet only a minority of biblical scholars are grammarians or lexicographers. Some are historians. Others focus on ancient culture and human anthropology. Some engage with literary theory. Many focus primarily on the larger exegetical tradition. In turn, not all biblical scholars engage linguistics directly. This is expected. Biblical studies’ primary object is not the languages, but the text: its meaning and interpretation. Grammar, lexicon, and the rest, these domains of linguistics, are a means to that end. That makes linguistics in biblical studies an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor.

But semantics—meaning—is hard. Its study has constituted a descriptive challenge for linguistics and philosophy throughout the 20^th century (Firth, 1964, 173*, Johnson 1987, xix-xxxviii; Erickson 1984, 16; Matthews 1993, 113f.). That biblical scholarship has a primary goal of understanding the meaning of the text has certain implications for how subfields of linguistics are prioritized. Lexical semantics has, historically, received quite a high prioritization because the meaning of words often feels prima facia simpler than phrases or sentences. Morphosemantic categories like case, tense and aspect perhaps seem more accessible for similar reasons. Of course, that sense of simplicity can often be deceptive.

*”If we regard language as ‘expressive’ or ‘communicative’ we imply that it is an instrument of inner mental states. And as we know so little of inner mental states, even by the most careful introspection, the language problem becomes more mysterious the more we try to explain it by referring it to inner mental happenings that are not observable. By regarding words as acts, events, habits, we limit our inquiry to what is objective and observable in the group life of our fellows” (Firth 1964, 173).

What makes surveying the history of linguistics in biblical studies particularly difficult is that there are several such histories: the history of the specialists’ work, the history of the teaching grammars, and the history of reference works. How these three histories interact varies both in quantity and quality across the years. Fundamentally, linguistics in biblical studies is interdisciplinary work where methods are transferred from one discipline to another so that some research might spill over. Yet the disciplines themselves are maintained as separate and discrete. This has consequences. Broadly speaking it means that linguistic work done in Biblical studies tends to primarily happen at the PhD level or beyond among only a handful of scholars. Because the methods are foreign to the field, the results are difficult to integrate with the existing biblical studies tradition and rarely filter downward into pedagogical materials.

Instead, the established model of biblical language pedagogy engages the languages with the primary goal of mastering the grammar as a means for integrating students into the biblical studies research tradition rather than engaging students with biblical languages as human languages. Likewise, standard reference works tend toward an inherent methodological conservativism because such works ground that same research tradition. Van der Merwe’s (1990, 73) summarizes the situation saliently:

“It is a fact that OH [Old Hebrew] is taught at most academic institutions mainly to theological students. In most cases the main purpose for learning the language is to master the basic morphological and a few syntactic constructions of OH in order to, at least, follow translations or grammatical remarks in commentaries (written by theologians). Most introductory grammars mainly treat the inflectional forms of the verb and the noun, both of which are rather uncontroversial as far as their theoretical status is concerned. The other categories used, are in most cases those with which the students are already acquainted (due to the mother-tongue grammar and second language grammar they learned at school), e.g. adverb, conjunction, interjection, subject, object, etc. or those which they have acquired in their study of Greek or Latin, e.g. nominative, accusative, genitive, etc. This state of affairs contributes to an assumption that there exists a set of linguistic categories which are more or less universally applicable to all languages. As far as OH [Old Hebrew] is concerned, the reference grammars and lexica available also operate with these traditional categories. It is no wonder, therefore, that theologians often accept uncritically these traditional categories as “adequate” for the description of OH.”

Notably, van der Merwe has done as much as anyone, if not more, in striving to integrate linguistics into biblical studies in the years since since he wrote these words. And yet they still ring true, even today. They are eerily accurate for much of biblical scholarship’s engagement with Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, despite us being in an entirely different century.

Biblical scholars working with linguistics and linguists who study Ancient Greek and Hebrew face a decision every time they begin a project: how do they balance effectively communicating with the majority of biblical scholars in the field (non-language specialists) with the descriptive tools and terminology of the linguistics methods they value?

Works cited

Erickson, Richard. 1984. James Barr and the beginning of Biblical semantics. Notre Dame: Foundations Press.

Firth, J. R. 1964. The tongues of man and Speech. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Johnson, Mark. 1987. The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Matthews. P. H. 1993. Grammatical theory in the United States: From Bloomfield to Chomsky. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics Book 67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

van der Merwe, Christo. 1990. “An adequate linguistic framework for an Old Hebrew linguistic database: An attempt to formulate some criteria” Journal for Semitica 2/1, 72–89.