10:29 p.m.--8/26/2005.
Cultural and Sociolinguistic Implications of the Babatha Archive
For the Sociology of Language in the Earliest Christian Communities.

I have promised to examine closely the Babatha Library/Archive, as described in previous entries, with a view toward unraveling some of the mysteries concerning the properties of the language demographic in 1st-century Palestine, particularly as it might have bearing on the earliest Christian communities.

I have not divulged the inner structure of the web of social relations implied in the Babatha Archive, which in and of itself makes an exciting psychosocial reconstruction for the person inclined to what can be called 'the historical imagination.' My comments are restricted to language evidenced in the thirty-seven documents (actually, my volume has but twenty-six of this trove, still a major sample for scholarly purposes.)

In particular, I would like to focus in this entry on evidence of illiteracy among the common people of whom Dame Babatha was a representative. For it was written in one of the documents that a 'hand' [anamneutic, scribe] prepared a particular document for lady Babatha because "to autes me eidenai grammata," [Greek: 'she was not to know how to write-out'.] Of course, those having even scanty knowledge of the prevailing culture would quickly counter that women were not expected to be literate, were deliberately under-educated by the male-dominate system. This position would hold more currency if not for the demonstration, sometimes coupled with evidence of Babatha's illiteracy, of the general illiteracy of the male populace as well. We read at the end of "Document #15," after finding about Babatha's inability to write in Greek, we read this line in Aramaic by Babatha's husband Yehudah ('Judah') to demonstrate he nevertheless had skills, perhaps limited, in Aramaic: "Yyehudah son of Khtousian "lord" of Babatha: In my presence Babatha confirmed all that is written above. Yehudah wrote it." [Emphasis mine.]

The presence of Aramaic literacy suggests an education system in Palestine for common people, a notion in keeping with that held by Rabbinical scholars like Alfred Edersheim, whose Sketches of Jewish Social Life (Hendrickson Publishers, 1994, 1876) is a classic analysis of Rabbinical material to reconstruct life in Judaica during the lifetime of Jesus. Education seems to have been an extremely important aspect of Jewish cultural life, and was essentially available free-of-charge to every Jewish child. One may regard somewhat suspectly the rather rosy picture painted by Edersheim, but what is remarkable in the Babatha Archive is the relative vibrancy, on the one hand, of some literacy, and evidence that illiteracy was also common. It seems plain from the most-casual study of the Babatha Library that the 'plain' people by and large were not 'graphic' in Greek, let alone the true language of the Empire, Latin.

Nevertheless, what also seems clear is the penetration of Greek and Nabatean [this is really a matter of no surprising import, because Babatha lived part of her life in Petra, which was in the
Nabatean/Arabian Province] and while we do not see evidence thereunto, one may anticipate that such a complex set of documents as the New Testament could illustrate linguistic specimens of Aramaic, Persian, Latin, etc., etc. One with the least sense of 'sociological imagination' could envision a condition of all kinds of languages being spoken in Palestine during the period of the early Roman occupation, a condition known to Germans and linguists as Mischsprache, 'the mixing of several languages in one sociological environment.'

Now there is a great gulf between spoken language and text; the words of Jesus are still overweeningly believed to have been in Aramaic [although a close reading of the Babatha Archive makes the conscientious scholar speculate as to whether Jesus had at least 'pidgin' facility in Koine Greek, enough to get his point across but certainly no man for the 'middle voice' or 'pluperfect' or complicated 'passive-particple' constructions which the Evangelists must have interpolated into 'Q' through much editiorial working over generations of re-telling 'the good news.] Jesus may have known Hebrew enough to recite the Holy Prayers like Shema and Psalms like Hallel; indeed for all we know given the relatively enlightened educational system extant in Palestine for observant Jews we certainly cannot rule out the possibility that Jeus was completely literate in Hebrew.

I suspect this is about the 'box' into which we can cast the total state of knowledge on the matter of the language of Jesus. Therefore, in order to 'separate the wheat from the chaff' in all this, we can do no better than apply ourselves to a total study of the sociolinguistics of Palestine from the 1st century, learning everything one can about all forms of Aramaic (including Palestinian Jewish Aramaic, Biblical Aramaic, 'Dead-Sea-Scrolls' Aramaic, Syriac, Targumic Aramaic, Samaritan, and Palestinian Christian Aramaic), Hebrew (Rabbinical, Biblical, Mishnaic), Greek (Koine, Attic, Septuagint), Latin (as it has bearing on the syntactic formations of language in 1st-century Palestine.)

One also needs to heed cultural factors, as far as they can be determined from side-texts and from archeology and social studies. What is not often appreciated is that the language of a text itself can shed immense light on the cultural context. In this way, the Babatha Archive's brief collection of legal and business documents illustrates much about the context of the times, and fits like a key into the mysterious 'lock' of the New Testament and the Mishnah and the other Rabbinical and Apostolic writings.

Recently, I have read and have gained a grudging appreciation for a work which I shall cite now, Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective, by M.A.K. Halladay and Ruqaiya Hasan (Oxford Univrsity Press, 1989, 1985). In particular, I draw attention to the second part of this work by Dr. Hasan, the thesis of this section being that in linguistic utterances having meaning, text-and-cultural-context are intimately interwoven, so that the one cannot be seen independently of the other and each gives clues for comprehension of the other. Hasan's 'flow-chart' algebra is at first a little whelming to my eye, but once I understood the general principle that not only can history and social studies be used to ascertain the meaning of a text, but textual meanings can be used to explicate the meanings of social situations and culture. This interactive principle in exegesis and hermeneutics is pregnant with good science and possibility for the humanities!

I want to lift up this notion of finding out culture from text, for the simple, spare reason that the data bases I have at hand are weak in connections to rich sociology, archeology, and history.
This is true despite the New Testament, the witness of the Sages and Rabbis, Josephus, the archeological digs that have seemingly gone on without terminus in Palestine, and several quality post-hoc analyses of the Sitz-im-Leben [German: 'situation-in-life'] of the Palestinians living in the 1st-century Roman occupation. My point is that these works-- for all their mass-- at a particular point of analysis for a text usually 'break down' and 'wash out' into vapidity. One is left to figure out the cultural context--just as Ruqaiya Hasan asserts-- by considering both text and what is known of context-- including linguistic context-- a process not unlike solving a jigsaw puzzle!

The Babatha Library/Archive amounts to finding a key-piece in the jigsaw puzzle of fathoming the language scene of Jesus' time and place. I am learning to think that there was an Aramaic language tradition, part of which was written by the common people in Palestine. I also learn through the Babatha Archive that the common people resorted to Greek scribes to write 'important' documents as 'testaments.' This Greek does not appear to have been their first language, a language they had much facility in, perhaps no facility whatsoever. Then again, there seems to have been penetration of a number of languages in that one small geographic area, creating a condtion conductive to Mischsprachen and 'pidgins' and perhaps dialectical shifts unique to neighborhoods.

We shall continue our analysis of the Babatha Archive in subsequent entries for a time.