Why Did the Hebrews Speak Hebrew?

"An object is an act outside its time element." -Eugen Rosenstock-Huessey

Two experiences led to this question:

1) I studied biblical Hebrew in the 1960's under Ludwig Dewitz, a German Jew who converted to Christianity between the world wars, and escaped from the Nazis with nothing but the shirt on his back. He was a scholar of ancient Middle Eastern languages, and a man of God. He taught like an old European school master: he made us stand at our desks and parse Hebrew verbs--if we faltered he would mutter something in Yiddish and would throw erasers at us. It was terribly humiliating, especially since we considered ourselves graduate students, and beyond such behavior. I learned through sheer terror. But I loved the man, and I can still wake up in the night going qatal,qatalah,qataltah, qatalt, etc. I can't say that I mastered the language, but I can at least find my way around with a lexicon and a word study book.

2) I recently re-read Rosenstock's The Origin of Speech, a book which I read about 5 years ago, and which was so far outside the box of western rationalism that it deserved another look. In summary, Rosenstock believed that language, not thought, was the key to understanding man and his cultures. He also believed that our western emphasis on the indicative mood, the mood of reason and reflection, did not accurately describe the reality of human life. Instead, he began with the imperative, followed by the subjunctive, followed by the narrative, and finally, by the indicative.

To put this more simply: we are all born with immediate imperatives that determine our lives ("eat your cereal," "go to bed," "avenge your father," "renounce the devil and all his works," etc.). Most of our lives are lived in the subjunctive of possibility--will we fulfill our imperatives, or fail? After we achieve our imperatives, we "tell the tale," we relive our success and failures and write the story. Finally, as old men, we analyze the whole experience, and only at the end of our lives, enter the indicative. When life begins in the indicative, all of life is cold and abstract, because the indicative freezes it into something motionless; hence, "an object is an act outside its time element."

All story follows this pattern. But story is closer to reality than abstract analysis. Reality is story! I've used this before, but consider the Lord of the Rings: The Ring must be destroyed (imperative). The bulk of the trilogy is a quest--some fail, some succeed, but the quest reaches its end (subjunctive). The men write poems and histories, and the elves sing songs. The main characters pass into the West (narrative). Sam finishes the manuscript and writes a conclusion (indicative). Isn't this a description of all our lives?

Rosenstock also describes our stories lived out in "cups of time." An imperative gives us meaning and forces us into the future. Its fulfillment ends that cup of time. "Honey, take out the garbage," only is completed with "the garbage has been taken out." Otherwise the cup is not closed, and tension remains. When cups are not closed, an unfulfilled moment is created, and it must be relived til sealed. When Lee's command, "Get those people off that hill," was met later with "Sir, I have no division!" a cup of time was created that is still literally reenacted at Gettysburg every year. We never rest til cups are sealed.

So, back to my original question. Why did the Hebrews speak Hebrew? Every language explains the way its speakers perceive reality. Consider the almost non-existent use of the subjunctive in English (as compared to ancient Latin and Greek, which both had complete subjunctive conjugations). We only see it in the phrase, "if I were you...." All other instances of the subjunctive are expressed by helping words: "if," "maybe," "perhaps," "except." But the fact that we no longer have a mood to express probability in our language reveals how much we revere abstraction, and life itself becomes a "happening" or an "event," robbed of time. The present is an abstraction in the indicative; it is a force moving into the future in the subjunctive.

Biblical Hebrew was outside the western box. It contained seven binyanim, roughly what we would call moods. Six of these were either active or passive voices. To use English equivalents: an indicative, active and passive; an intensive, active and passive; a causative, active and passive; and a reflexive, which by nature can have only one voice. If the reflexive is placed in the middle, three actives on the left, and three passives on the right, an outline of Hebrew moods resembles a menorah, which modern Hebrew teachers use as a visual aid to understand the structure of the language.

Old Covenant Hebrew thought grew out of their language, and their language affected ideation, and if we believe in Biblical inspiration, their view of God and His world, and God’s view of reality should “leak out” through the structure of the Old Covenant language. The amazing thing is how difficult it is to find any discussion of this fact. I dug out my old Hebrew grammar book and read the introduction. It told me about the author, and why he chose to use his very systematic approach to learning the grammar, and how it had helped countless students to meander the binyanim conjugations, but not once did he tell me why the Hebrews spoke Hebrew--a perfect example of the tyranny of the indicative, a lot of hows and whats and no whys.

Let me illustrate with something I think I understand. Hebrew has no subjunctive mood. At least, it had no conjugation that required the long vowel sounds of the Greek and Latin subjunctives. I say, “no subjunctive,” until one considers the Hebrew tense system. There is no present tense in biblical Hebrew. That function is taken by the participle, and sometimes by the infinitive, when necessary. (I read somewhere that modern Hebrew uses the participle with helping pronouns to express the present.)

Biblical Hebrew had two tenses: complete, and incomplete. An action was either finished, or was on the way to completion. The only way that can be expressed in English is with the past or the future tenses. Complete, incomplete. Done, or not done, or partially done. We rest in a finished work, or strive to complete it. I said in the last paragraph that Hebrew had no subjunctive; but here it is, hidden in the cup of time created by the beginning of an action and its fulfillment. The whole tense system creates a subjunctive mood. And because it is subjunctive, it is also eschatological. The whole language sucks us into the future towards a fulfillment. “And it shall be in that day” draws us towards “and it came to pass.” I find this an incredibly beautiful expression of struggle and life lived with a hoped-for goal in mind, so different from our present tense indicative obsessed with scientific definition (“the human being is made up of 70% water”). Why didn’t the text book author tell me this? Because he is western scholar whose job it is to turn a living language into a frozen object.

Now I want to look at a couple of other binyanim, with much less certainty about their meaning. I must admit at this point that I know nothing about modern Hebrew, or about parallel thought forms in other Middle Eastern languages. For all I know, Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi manifest the same concepts of time. That would draw us into a study of the Islamic mind, and, wow, do I digress.

Biblical Hebrew possessed what we called the piel/pual conjugation, or, in English, the intensive form. It basically shortened vowel sounds, which connects it indirectly to the imperative, which is the shortest form of the verb in most languages. That's because the imperative is both command and warning. The intensive forms are translated in English with "very," "exceedingly," "continually." In some cases they simply intensify a verb: "break" put into the intensive form became "smash." In other cases time is involved: "weep" put into the intensive form did not mean to "weep loudly;" it meant rather to "weep continually."

That's all interesting, but the question still remains: why would a culture find a need to create a whole complex conjugation around a concept that we simply express with "very?" I've read that the Hebrews were realists, earthy, and not given to abstract meditation or reflection. I'm not sure about that. The author of Ecclesiastes wore himself out with reflection, and concluded that man should eat and drink and enjoy his labor--a carpe diem theme. It wasn't so much that the Hebrews didn't reflect; they reflected intensely, almost violently ("whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might"). In fact, "live to the hilt" describes the mood of much of the narratives in the Old Testament. The intensity of their lives grew out of faith in an intense God. They, at least the godly ones, would be far too intense, pushy, physical, and emotionally raw to get along in our church culture, which says a lot about how frivolous our western approach to God can be.

Lastly, Hebrew also possessed the hiphil/hophal conjugation. It was causative. Normally translated "he/she caused thus and thus to happen," it also could form a new concept. For instance, the causative of the verb to "go" meant "send:" to cause to go was of course to send. Combined with its person and gender and an accusative pronominal suffix, an English phrase like "she caused him to fall" could be condensed into one word--quite a feat of grammatical acrobatics to English speakers. At any rate, why did the Old Covenant people find it necessary to form an entire verb system around the idea of causation?

The first use of the causative is in Gen. 1:4: “And God divided the light from the darkness.” The verb in the indicative is “separated,” and in the causative becomes “and God caused the light to be separated from the darkness,” or simply, “divided.” I don’t want to make too much of the fact God is the subject in the first use of the causative; I suppose it could have been Adam, or Eve, or the devil. Nevertheless, there is a hint that all causation goes back to God as the Creator. Could it be that the Hebrew language manifests a belief in final purpose, an eschaton growing out of God’s predestination and providential care of history? Hence, a conjugation based on causation.

All this is pure speculation, and poor at that, because I’m out here on my own. I am back again to the question, “Why did the Hebrews speak Hebrew?” It amazes me that I suffered erasers and Yiddish deprecations of my mental ability, strange lists of sounds, many years of struggling with large lexicons and word books because I felt I owed my congregations the honesty of sound exegesis (and remember, I did all this backwards), and no one has ever told me WHY the Hebrews used the patterns of word and thought that I simply memorized. It brought me no closer to the interior mind of the Old Testament saints, and consequently, the heart of God. Is there anybody out there that has come across a book, a website, an insight, etc, or am I stuck with the tyranny of the indicative?