The Death of Hebrew
One key notion implicitly embedded within the
modern biblical scholarship that emerged in Michaelis’s
wake was that Hebrew was a dead language. The death of the Hebrew language and
of the Hebrew culture of biblical times was a position assumed by Michaelis,
and Legaspi rightly underscores this facet of Michaelis’s work, clarifying for
us the import of this starting point for the study not only of Hebrew philology
but of biblical studies more broadly speaking. Thus, when Michaelis utilized
Arabic language and literature for Hebräistik,
he did so not only as a n important cognate field for understanding Hebrew
better, but rather as a necessary philological tool supplanting earlier views
concerning the superiority of living Jewish knowledge of Hebrew. Viewing Hebrew
as essentially dead created an
enormous gulf between the ancient Israelite and Jewish communities from the
time of the Bible, for whom the Hebrew biblical traditions were their lived
traditions, and Michaelis’s contemporary European Jews, whom Christians had previously
envisioned as intimately tied to this tradition, indeed for whom these
Christians believed this tradition remained a living Jewish tradition. Thus,
prior to Michaelis, there had been a long history of Christian recourse to
Jewish learning in order to understand the Hebrew language, Jewish traditions
of interpretation, and the Bible itself. This was the case with Saint Jerome
(347-420), Nicholas of Lyra (1270-1349), Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), and, a
bit closer to Michaelis’s time, both Johannes Buxtorf (1564-1664). Before
Michaelis, there existed a tradition of Christian exegetes searching out Jewish
teachers to learn Hebrew and Jewish interpretations. What Michaelis initiated
was a tradition of Christian Hebrew scholarship that made no attempt to consult
living Jewish authorities. Michaelis saw no need to consult living Jews who
read the Torah in Hebrew. He believed that scholarship, ostensibly pure Wissenschaft, alone could be master of
Hebrew, which was essentially dead, a thing of the past.
Michaelis therefore regarded his own
knowledge of Hebrew as superior to that of living Jewish authorities. In his
mind, the Hebrew knowledge and learning of his Jewish contemporaries was in
some sense corrupted from what it had been during Jesus’s time and before. This
became exemplified in the disparities of pronunciation, for example, of Hebrew
between later German Wissenschaft des
Judentums scholars, who bequeathed the standard pronunciation of Hebrew
still taught in most Western university classrooms, and the different living traditions
of Hebrew pronunciation among Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews to this day. The
Sephardic pronunciation, like that spoken in the modern state of Israel, which
has also become the standard liturgical pronunciation to Reform and
Conservative Judaism in the United States, differs in many ways from the
standard pronunciation Christians tend to be taught in the academy.
Legaspi mentions a further pont that often
goes unrecognized but remains of the upmost importance for understanding both
Michaelis’s own work and what comes later in modern biblical criticism—namely,
this periodization of the history of Israel and of the Jewish people, which
Michaelis initiates. As Legaspi indicates: “Michaelis also introduced what
became an important element in his program of study: the periodization of
Israelite and Jewish history. A separation between the pre-exilic and
subsequent periods, especially the modern Jewish one, allowed Michaelis to
dispense with the latter” (Legaspi, Death
of Scripture, 88). Elaborating, Legaspi explains how “Michaelis took pains
in his programmatic writings to marginalize Jewish scholarship, discredit
rabbinic exegesis, and sever any connection between the language of the Old
Testament and the degraded ‘Euro-Hebrew’ of contemporary Jews” (Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 96).
Michaelis’s shift to cognate languages, and
to the living Arabic language in particular, must be understood in this
context. His “genealogical maneuver” as Legaspi puts it, of overemphasizing the
proximity of Hebrew to Arabic and related Semitic languages, “allowed him to
experience Hebrew as a living language through its sister Arabic, while
ignoring Jews, the most obvious living speakers of Hebrew” (Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 91). Michaelis’s
emphasis on philology was, moreover, not merely for philology’s sake. Michaelis
argued that the very words that make up a language are culture bearers; words
carry, hidden within themselves, the very culture form which they arise Words
are veritable repositories of culture. For Michaelis, then, “The philologist .
. . gains access not only to a group’s text but also the ethos, the mindset,
and the collective wisdom of the culture. He encounters its history and its Geist” (Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 92).
As we later see flourish among nineteenth-century
scholars like Julius Wellhausen and William Robertson Smith, Michaelis saw his
contemporary Arab culture which flourished in the Middle Easter as nearly
identical to ancient Israelite culture. Thus, his contemporary Arab culture
represented the living culture of the Old Testament, in sharp contrast to his
contemporary Jewish culture, which was corrupt and which departed drastically,
through foreign and various historical influences shaping it, from their Old
Testament forebears. Legaspi asserts that “[t]he systematic effort to interpret
the Hebrew Bible ethnograpically, in terms of present-day Arab language and
culture, then, was one of the most distinctive features of Michaelis’s program
for Hebrew study and biblical interpretation” (Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 95). We would add that this effort continued in
modern biblical criticism after Michaelis’s time, and perhaps reached its
highest point in the work of Robertson Smith (e.g., in his Religion of the Semites). (Scott W. Hahn and Jeffrey L. Morrow, Modern Biblical Criticism as a Tool of
Statecraft (1700-1900) [Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Academic, 2020], 89-93)