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.

12:25 a.m.--8/22/2005.
Further Elaboration on the Babatha 'Library:'
Positive Proof that Certain Aramaic Texts Were Translated into Koine Greek.

The premise of The Critical Edition of Q (Augsburg Fortress Press, 2000) is that Q-- the sayings-text common to Luke and Matthew and (exotically) to the Gospel of Thomas was in origin Greek and never had an Aramaic Ur-Text from which to generate permutations of logia. This impressive 581-page tome speaks with the authoritative editorial scholarship of James M. Robinson, Paul Hoffmann, and John S. Kloppenborg, world-renowned experts on Q, and with the critical endorsement of the International Q Project (IQP). The great weight of authority, in other words, on the basis of extraordinarily reasoned scholarship, is that every edition of Q and consequently mutatis mutandis the Gospels comes to us utterly in Koine Greek.

Yet I have introduced the Babatha 'library/archive' in the previous entry, and will for several more entries dwell on these important discoveries from a cave in Israel containing material from around the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135 C.E.), comfortably within the culture that Jesus witnessed.

I want to call attention that two of the items from The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters... (Israel Exploration Society, Jerusalem, 1989), Number 5 and Number 6, show clearly that they were translated from another language--almost certainly Aramaic given the near-total context of everything else linguistically-- into rough Koine Greek. A clear interpolation in 'Fragment a.,' 'column i' in the Greek is for ermEneia, which the commentators are quick to point out means "translation [or "interpretation".] The notes here go on to say that the original text may have been in Nabatean, but was more likely to have been in Aramaic.

In either case, if this reading implies that a translation of a Semitic document took place into Greek, we have sociolinguistic evidence demonstrating that 'important' Semitic documents were translated into Greek. That Semitc language almost certainly was Palestinian Jewish Aramaic common to the idiom of the 1st century...but not a universe away from Syriac Aramaic or so-called Babylonian Jewish Aramaic ('Chaldee' so-called.)

Document Number 6 from this volume, in the Outer Text, at line Number 25 again shows-- this time without interpolation of any kind-- ermEneia, demonstrating that this is a translation from a 'foreign' text, prsumably Aramaic. This gets further amplified in the next line with the phrase, upethEka akolouthOs progegragrammenois, "I.O.U. following the translation."
This is further amplification of the same point, that there was a tendency among Palestinian Jews circa Jesus' time to write important documents indeed in Aramaic, and then as need arose in Koine Greek before an appropriate scribe. That this might have occurred with the Evangelical Message or with Q is a facile cognition to entertain, given these precepts.

This is not the only evidence the Babatha Archive exposes revealing a possible substrate of Aramaic parlance if not documentation for the Jesus-logia and the other Church tradtions found in the Gospels including the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas. I am led to conject on a possibility that comes to my mind in this connection that seems to have some bearing on the total 'Aramaic mix' to which we are indulging our research efforts, and by that I mean the elusive connection between the logia of Jesus and the Aramaic precursor hypothesized for the Diatessaron of Tatian, a 'Harmony of the Gospels' assembled in the earliest part of the second century, now known in Arabic and Latin, and fragmentally in Syriac commentary by Ephraem the Hermit. Kurt and Barbara Aland, in The Text of the New Testament (1989, 1981) attest to the seminal importance of the Diatessaron as influencing the Old Syriac Gospels, the Peshitta, and the entire Syriac tradition.

But my query, I think comes prior to the Syriac tradition, rests squarely in the Palestinian Aramaic tradition. Now it should not be overstated that there were great differences between the dialect of Palestine and that of Edessa... the principal difference lay in the formation of the imperfect, with Syriac taking a preformative nun and Palestinian taking a preformative yodh for the imperfect...the rest is quite readable except for an idiomatic expression here and there.

Both the Syriac tradition and the Paletinian Aramaic Jewish tradition are strong bearers of oral culture; in song and legend the Syriac tradition is exceedingly rich, and with great accuracy it would seem the Rabbis recorded the stories of the Sages from earliest times into the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. It does not at all seem implausible to think that 'Jesus-sayings' could have been preserved as had been the case for the Rabbis and passed into cognate Syriac and thence to 'Diatessaron-like' harmonies. Aland and Aland indicate just how 'impure,' let us say 'yeasty' the mix of Aramaicisms must have been prior to the suspension of the Diatessaron.

So much for speculation. What we do know is that there was a literary tradition in 'Jesus'' Palestine to write important documents in Aramaic; this demonstrates first of all that to some extent Aramaic was a literary language. Whether Sagely writings like sayings of preachers were ever recorded is only a little less certain, for we have the utter weight of the Dead Sea Scrolls to bear testmony to this possibility!

Therefore, whether one considers an oral tradition or a putative written tradition, the real possibility that a massive Aramaic substrate lies beneath the relatively placid text of the Gospels' Greek. We shall continue to examine the interface between the Greek and the Aramaic, using not the N.T. but the Babatha library as our first 'study example,' both for language analysis and for the view of cultural context this archive presents.

The Bearing of Greek (and Latin) on Palestinian Language in the lst Century C.E.

There are several writings that attempt to illustrate the interface between Greek and Aramaic in 1st-century Palestine in a statistical way; I have already alluded to some of these. Recently I came upon a headliner of an example which makes good sociology as well as good sociolinguistics to illustrate the breathing relationship between these two languages.. and even a third, Latin, which after all was the tongue of the dominant Romans who governed Palestine and well into Arabia in those days.

The example, the text to which I refer, is the 'Babatha library,' most of which is found in The Documents from the Bar-Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters (Israel Exploration Society, 1989). This 'Babatha' was a Jewess whose papyrus and goatskin documents were found in a cave in a wadi ('occasionally running stream') near the Dead Sea dating from the bloody Jewish revolt against the Romans between 132-135 C.E. From this fray, Babath probably took sanctuary in the wee cavrn now called the 'Cave of Letters' for her trove of legal documents left behind after what may have been her decimation at the hands of the Romans. By the documents and by the remains in the cave we surmise she may have been about 15 years of age at death.

Babatha married twice, had one husband die, and had an orphan Jesus whom she was accused legally--in papers in her 'library' of 37 letters-- of not caring for her orphan, whom she left under the tuteledge of a hunchback named Simon. She apparently was a woman of property, with some land, and an orchard, and fig crops.

But we are interested in sociolinguistics, the interplay of language communities here, in this case Aramaic [Babatha's language] and Koine Greek [the language of the business conducted in most of the documents.] This has direct bearing on the web of the New Testament, we shall see, in the way we find Babatha's documents put together. It is clear that the signatories to the Greek documents were first and foremost Aramaic/Nabatean writers, as their holographs indicate. The minority of documents are in Palestinian Aramaic characteristic of the Tannaic [early Rabbinical] Period writing, domestic documents declaring Babatha's husband 'lord' [adon] of the household and over her.

It seems abundantly clear that at that time and in that locale if important documents were to be issued, one went like Babatha or her associates to a 'scribe' who penned a document in the lingua franca of the Eastern Roman Empire, Koine Greek. In such a way, it seems inevitable that the Aramaic-speakers of the very first Jesus Movement would have wasted no time in getting to a scribe who-- be he called a grammateus or liblarios-- still functioned to interpret and render into Greek 'the news,' perhaps an evangelion ['good news.'] This Hellenistic tongue may or may not have been understood at all by the utterers of 'the word,' as seems to be the case with illiterate Babatha [who had to have a co-signatory] and her Aramaic/Nabatean counterparts.

This is not all we can infer. A further set of inferences has to do with the linguistic shift from Aramaic speech-- which in PALESTINE then had no literary value-- to the written text of sayings and traditions which became the Gospels in Greek. As far as I can intuit, in a culture as traditional as one valuing oral song and poetry, IT IS NOT AT ALL SAFE TO RULE OUT-- AS NOW SEEMS TO BE THE VOGUE (cf. The Critical Edition of Q, edited by J.M. Robinson, P. Hoffmann, and J.S. Kloppenborg [Augsbug Fortress Press, 2000]) the viability of Aramaic 'sayings' material by Jesus being preserved in a manner IDENTICAL to the way the Rabbis sayings were saved by the Jews. THIS IS AN ORIENTAL CUSTOM NOT IN KEEPING WITH THE WAYS OF THE WEST!

Clearly, however, though Aramaic was the peasant-language in Palestine, much of Jewry in Palestine and all the rest of the Eastern Roman Empire spoke some variant of Koine Greek, which was a vulgarized form of Attic ['Athenian' ] Greek with a generalizing and simpifying grammatical and syntactic trend. The Septuagint-- the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible deriving from Alexandrian Jews in the 3rd century B.C.E.-- became the first Bible of the Evangelists and Paul and to the Catholic Church.

The New Testament itself, in its first edition, is utterly Greek: anyone who tries to argue otherwise swims against a riptide of evidence. Yet it seems clear that Jesus himself spoke Aramaic, and the Babatha archive suggests that should the first 'Q' have been in Greek textually, it stood highest likelihood of having been polished and re-polished by subsequent redaction. A glance at a critical edition of the New Testament reveals how cunningly true this last statement rings (cf. Greek-English New Testament, edited by Barbara and Kurt Aland [Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1998, 1981]).

Latin seems to represent a minority influence in the N.T.; yet we find its influence in the Babatha library in foreshortening the frequency of the definite article, and in syntax. Occasionally in the New Testament, we come upon a Latin word. And of course we read that the 'sigla' announcing that 'This is Jesus, King of the Jews,' was in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (Luke 23:38; John 11:8.) One does well to note that while the commercial language of the Eastern Empire was Greek, the Romans insisted on Latin, used a Latin calendar, held to Roman law, counted in the Roman system, worshipped Roman gods... at the very top of society hardly tipping into the world where Jesus lived and breathed until it was veritably too late!

This is my overview of Greek and Latin, and capitulates an overview of what I see in the domain of Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek and Latin bearing on the puzzle of the language of Jesus. This puzzle will be a link to the larger mystery of what made this epoch-shaking man think and sway people. Much of what I shall have to say as the puzzle leads more-solidly into said mystery about Jesus will be on the order of hypotheses (plural): BUT THIS INDULGENCE IS TO BE PERMITTED EVEN THE MOST-SCIENTIFIC WHO MUST CREATE AN ANALYTIC CONSTRUCT FROM 'CONTENT.'

12:25 a.m.--8/6/2005.
Notes on Late Hebrew.

I have said that current thinking holds that Jesus knew a certain amount of Hebrew, or that the dialect of Galilee was rich in words which were more Hebrew than Aramaic in etymology and morphology. In this section I would like to mark off just what kind of Hebrew constituted this source material, at least hypothetically.

The degree to which peasants in Galilee could read Biblical Hebrew cannot be assumed to be very great; more likely is the case of learning Biblical Hebrew by association with the cultus at the Jerusalem Temple and in local synagogues. In this last instance learning would have been a matter of recitation not reading.

Still, we have record that Jesus read the Tanakh in Synagogue (Luke 4:18-19), and these need not be taken lightly. What we do not know is whether in this Old Synagogue the Septuagint [Greek translation of the Masoretic Text] was used, the Targum [Aramaic 'Version'], or the Hebrew text itself for Isaiah 61:1-2; 58:6...to this Luke is silent.

I am getting much of my material here from a chapter entitled, "Languages and Cultural Traditions," in a book by Richard A. Horsley entitled, Archeology,History and Society in Galilee: The Social Context of Jesus and the Rabbis (Trinity Press International, 1996), pp. 154-175. One of the reported findings from Galilean epigraphic remains reveals that 40% show Greek inscriptions, 40% report Hebrew, and more than 50% report Aramaic. This is said to support the notion that Aramaic was the most-widely-spoken language in Galilee during the second-temple period.

This chapter on language by Horsley also cites the literature from the 'Cave of Letters' deriving from the period of the Bar Kokhba Revolt (l32-135 C.E.): here we find less than fifty documents, most of which are in Greek, some in Aramaic, and a few in Hebrew. These seem to be cognate with the Bar Kokhba conspirators ideological work, plus the trove of a widow woman named Babata, who left in the cave a number of business documents. She apparently had sought refuge with the Bar Kokhba revolutionaries in the cave.

Of special interest--for Hebrew studies-- is the note that one epistle from the Cave of Letters suggests that: "...a desire has not been found to write in Hebrew" (Horsley, p.166). Horsley supposes that this relates to the fact that few people at the time may have spoken Hebrew.

A contrasting argument found in Horsley is a reference to a thesis that Mishnaic Hebrew amounts to northern "Israelian Hebrew" into which the Judean traditions were cast. The study to which Horsley refers for this thesis is: Gary A. Rendsburg, "The Galilean Background of Mishnaic Hebrew," in The Galilee of Late Antiquity (Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York, 1992), pp. 225-239. Horsley does much to denigrate this argument!

If the Galilean spoke Hebrew, it is likely this Hebrew was of its own vernacular. It is said that Samaritan Hebrew has some bearing on the idiosyncracies of Galilean vernacular. One of the pergrinations this much-peregrinating web-log intends to make will be to explore the known connectednesses of Samaritan (as exhibited in the Samaritan Pentateuch ab originalis) to Mishnaic Hebrew and Palestinian Jewish Aramaic.

I have not touched upon two other great sources of Late Hebrew-- the Hebrew portions of Daniel (Masoretic Text) and the Hebrew portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And now that I am thinking about it, since Ecclesiastes was said to have been translated from Aramaic into late Hebrew (really Middle Hebrew), this could be a source of diachronic guidance as well. [A 'diachronic' analysis is one done-- particularly in linguistics-- on a chronological perspective.] [A 'synchronic' analysis is particularly a linguistic analysis done from one time perspective.]

This will be a great voyage, with numerous forays, just on a lark. I tire of the usual business of preparing for writing as one last great smorgasbord: I want to use this blog as my notebook-- a vast notebook open to anyone curious--about this great adventure to fathom the language of Jesus.

Aramaic was definitely in the language mix in this case;

Hebrew--as I have tried to illustrate and outline here, has some bearing;

And Greek (and even Latin) had some contribution as languages of Empire and as Koine.
Next I shall write notes about Greek and a few words on Latin as befitting this puzzle!

2:11 a.m.--8/2/2005.
An Overview of the Forms and Varieties of Aramaic.

This entry does not profess to be original research; apart from my sidelong comments bearing on my studies, I get the 'stuff' of this entry-- still solid knowledge for the fledgling-- from the article entitled "Aramaic" from the first volume of The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (Abingdon Press, Nashville, TN, 2000, 1962), pp.185-190.

Aramaic is a Semitic language, closely related to ancient Akkadian, classical Arabic, Hebrew; at one vast period of time it was the lingua franca of the greatest majority of folk from a span of countries from Egypt, south into Arabia, north into Kurdistan and Afganistan and Pakistan. It was the official and dominant language of the Assyrian Empire and one of the official languages of the Persian (Pahlavi) Empire based in Iran.

The 'roots' of Aramaic may be surmised with some certainty by archeological artifacts containing writings from the Middle East. Aram is mentioned in these records as a place name, peopled by individuals who were not Semites, this location besing designated as in the Northeast of Syria. The Assyrians seem to have derived from a tribe of Northern Arabians who spoke 'proto-Aramaic'; these invaders of Mesopotamia were called the Suti. The Interpretr's Dictionary of the Bible entry here takes note that every Jew recalls [at Passover]: "A wandering Aramean was my father," Deuteronomy 26:5, emphasis mine.

Since the Hebrew people were subjected to the Babylonian Captivity, it is not surprising to read that Aramaic had become the language of Palestine when Ezra returned-- and then Nehemiah--from shame to rebuild a shattered Israel; nor is it surprising to find that parts of the Old Testament are written in Aramaic. These passages include Ezra 4:8-6:18; 7:12-26; Daniel 2:4b-7:28, and a gloss in Jeremiah 10:11. Generally, the 'newer' texts of the O.T. show a trend toward Aramaic usage and vocabulary, and it is also true that the Aramaic of Daniel is closer to the lst-century idiom of Jesus putative tongue than would be the passages from Ezra.

With the coming of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Period, Greek gradually replaced Aramaic in much of the 'Western' world, but the East in Edessa, Syria, and at Babylon, and specifically in Palestine, Aramaic retained a stubborn allure... in no small part for the religious treasures not conveyed by Greco-Latin culture. In Palestine specifically, it was said that only a few, the elite of the elite, were literate, and that the language of culture was Greek. Mishnah Megillah 1:8 indicates that scripture could be written in Greek, and thus we witness the Septuagint (LXX), very much a Jewish product of Hellenistic times.

Yet while the upper classes, the ruling establishment, and certain bilingual peasants may have spoken Greek, the prevailing view of scholars is that the language of Palestine [read here 'Galilee'] was a peculiar form of 'Hebraized Aramaic,' which can perhaps be imagined by picturing a mixture of speech [same as German sense: Mischsprache] confounding Palestinian Jewish Aramaic (the stuff of M. Sokoloff's Dictionary along with careful use of Jastrow's Dictionary for Aramaicisms) plus Mishnaic Hebrew in a liberal conjunction. This Aramaic/Hebrew shows up in the N.T. renderings Maran atha ['Messiah come']; talitha cumi ['damsel arise']; ephphatha ['be thou opened']; and Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani ['My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?'].

This is a passing note, just my Kentucky hillbilly freethinking at work. In the N.T. and in LXX, 'Hebrew' is said to refer to Aramaic. Cf. ebrais @ Acts 21:40; 22:2; 26:14; also 4 Maccabees 12:7; 16:15. Should ebrais phOnE be thought to actually be a form of Hebrew, or rather this Mischsprache of Aramaic and Hebrew to which scholars now point as likely for 1st-century Palestine?

The answer to the musing just posed requires work I cannot now do, but by-the-by as these entries accrue, and as my knowledge of the scholarship takes shape (I suspect in the end much will always have to be left to surmise) my guesses will become, I trow, more confident.