Episode 118d: Hebrew and Jewish Egypt

Today we are doing something a little different. I am presenting you with two short bonus episodes that up to this point were only available to Patrons of the show on Patreon.com/historyofthepapacy. I publish bonus content regularly, but you can only get it on Patreon. Occasionally, I will share some of these episodes to both give you a little taste of what is going on over on Patreon and if the topic of the bonus content fits in with the series.

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Music Provided by:
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Agnus Dei X - Bitter Suite Kevin MacLeaod (incomptech.com)
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By Pam Brophy, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9124089
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Begin Transcript:
[00:00:00] Thank you for listening to the history of the papacy. I'm your host. Steve, you can find show notes, how to contact me, sign up for our mailing list. Dan, how to support the history of the papacy by going to the website a to Z history page.com. Speaking of supporting the show, Patrion is a great way to do that.
We are@patrion.com forward slash history of the papacy. You well know the tears. Antioch Alexandria, Constantinople and Rome. They each have their own privileges and rights and the best privilege and right, is that you will be in included on the history of the papacy. Diptychs a fun fact about the college of Cardinals is.
Bird the Cardinal of north America, bright red [00:01:00] bird is named after Cardinal. So fun fact. Now let us commemorate the Patrion patrons on the history of the papacy. Diptychs we have Roberto Yoren William Bryan. Jeffrey Christina, John, Sarah and William H at the Alexandria level, we have Dapo Paul, Justin Lano, and John, all of whom are magnificent Constantinople and reaching that ultimate power and prestige that on the sea of Rome, we have Peter the great Leonard, the great, and Alex, the group.
As you well know, we are a member of the Parthenon podcast network featuring Richard limbs, this American president podcast, among many other great shows go over to Parthenon podcast.com to learn more. Today's episode is something a little bit different. I am presenting you with two short bonus episodes at up to this point.
We're only available to patrons of the show on patrion.com forward slash history of the papacy. I published bonus content regularly. But you can only get [00:02:00] it on Patrion. Occasionally I will share some of these episodes on, uh, the public feed to give you a little taste of what's going on over at Patrion.
And if the topic of the bonus content fits in with the series, which it does in this case, it's a win-win today's bonus content. As a short conversation I had with Gil Kedron of a podcast at biblical proportions on his experiences as a native speaker of Hebrew. Well reading the old Testament. The second episode is a short introduction to the second temple Egypt, Jewish theologian, philosopher and politician phylo of Alexandria bylaws work had a huge impact on early Christianity.
He even likely lived during the time of. Patrion is a great way. If you want to support the show and keep the history of the papacy as a going concern and sustainable for long in the future. So I would definitely love it if you would consider becoming a patron. [00:03:00] I, and as well as I hope you enjoy this bit of bonus content, and if you want.
You can find more on Patrion with that. Here's the next piece of the mosaic of the history of the Pope's of Rome and Christian Church.
Welcome back to the history of the papacy in 10 minutes or less, at least we try definitely no more than 15 minutes decline and fall and extinction of languages, the usual life cycle of a language. It almost never goes the other way from death to rebirth. Hebrew is one of the biggest examples of a language that flipped the VAT trend on its head.
And in a way it might be the only example of language that's flipped the trend in this bonus episode of the history of the papacy [00:04:00] and 10 minutes podcast, I talked with Gil key drawn of a podcast of biblical proportions about his experience as a native speaker of heat. Before we get to Gill and my conversation on Hebrew, I thought I'd share a little background on the 3000 year old history of this most biblical of languages.
Let's go back to Hebrews ancient origins. Several thousand years ago, part of the Northwest Semitic branch of the Afros Semitic language family broke off and kind of started its own thing that was Hebrew. But Hebrew developed within the Canaanites branch of this family, Hebrew is very similar to ancient Canaanite and Phoenician, uh, and, and many, many, many ways.
And a lot of ways that's indistinguishable from them. You know, obviously with its own flair Hebrew developed a writing system based on the [00:05:00] Phoenician alphabet. Both of these languages had no vowel markers though. Vowels needed to be understood from context in order to be read. So you would see a consonant cluster and a reader would know where the vowels were supposed to fit in.
And that makes things interesting for modern scholars trying to read these documents, but it's, it's. It's not quite as complicated as it might seem, especially coming from a Indo-European language where vowels play more of a role and how words are developed, but that's neither here nor there. Hebrew was the spoken and written language of the Judeans and Israelites until about 200 BC.
They wrote the Bible in it and wrote a lot of the Bible in it, spoke it, et cetera. Did liturgical rights in Hebrew. After that time. Now the lingua franca of the middle east became Aramaic another Semitic language, [00:06:00] similar enough to Hebrew, but definitely its own thing. And the Aramaic took on more popularity.
So for example, Jesus, in the early part of the common IRO spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew as his day-to-day language. At this point, Hebrew essentially died as a spoken language. It remained a literary and liturgical language. Of course, though, Hebrew was well and truly dead though, as a spoken language and compare that to say Latin Latin never really died as a spoken language.
Classical Latin was from frozen in time. But the spoken language of vulgar Latin, the language of the people slowly changed into Italian, Portuguese, Spanish. Walloon the V-Loc or hundreds of other languages that just over time languages change this common tongue of vulgar Latin slowly changed, [00:07:00] slowly changed one and Wallonia and changed into a balloon in Romania.
It got separated from the body of other. Romance languages and kind of did its own thing. And that's just a natural progress of language. Hebrew. Didn't do this though. It stayed locked in time. Hebrew was used liturgically, but as a liturgical language, not as a spoken language and that's different. Jews spoke the local language of where they lived.
If they were in Spain, they spoke Spanish and Germany. They spoke German and England or the United States. They spoke English. A lot of them in the middle east kept speaking Aramaic. They also spoke Arabic. You name it. Jews around the world, use liturgical Hebrew in their prayers, reading Torah, the Mishnah and other texts.
They also spiced up their spoken language, such as English, German, et cetera, with a different, what you might [00:08:00] call Hebrew isms. They would put in little bits of Hebrew, Hebrew idiom into their language. There was so much spicing up that the languages, the Jews spoke can, in some cases almost be considered a separate language.
Yiddish. For example, Yiddish is very close to modern standard German. It's different enough that if you really truly want to speak Yiddish, you have to learn it. You have to learn slightly different pronunciations. You have to learn idioms, et cetera. The next phase of Hebrew is in the early middle ages, a group of Jewish scholars, the Mazza reads codafide