The Mother Tongue

Now at this time, as the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint developed on the part of the ^[b]Hellenistic Jews against the native Hebrews, because their widows were being overlooked in the daily serving of food.  Acts 6:1 NASB

Hellenistic Jews – Notice the footnote?  Here’s what it says: “Jews who adopted the Gr language and much of Gr culture through acculturation.”  In other words, Luke notes that there was a group of people in the assembly that spoke Greek as the mother tongue.  He mentions a similar group with the same words in Acts 9:29.  This is important.  Martin Hengel notes:

“While Aramaic was the vernacular of ordinary people, and Hebrew the sacred language of religious worship and of scribal discussion, Greek had largely become established as the linguistic medium for trade, commerce and administration.”[1]

“S. Krauss’s work on loanwords from Greek and Latin in rabbinic literature, i.e. from the second century CE, contains ‘around 3000 items . . . and these extend over the whole realm of human language.’”[2]

“However, the earliest Greek loanwords do not appear only in the Mishnah . . . they already occur in the copper scroll of Qumran.”[3]

Greek words, and therefore Greek ideas, were already incorporated into the thought process of Israel, so much so that some groups of Jews spoke Greek as their basic language, while virtually all Jews had some interaction with Greek, even in Israel.  We should not be surprised to find thousands of loanwords, but we might very well be surprised to find these words incorporated into the copper scroll of Qumran.  The scroll is not only unusual due to its material, but also due to its content.  It’s about buried treasure.[4]  This scroll contains Greek words.  Amazing for a community that eschewed all the corruption of the contemporary Hellenistic world.

But our lesson isn’t about treasure hunting.  It’s about cross-cultural linguistic absorption.  First century Israel was filled with ideas from all over the Mediterranean world; ideas that were transported in the common Greek language of the Empire.  Those ideas are incorporated into the religious communities of Israel, even the separatist one like Qumran.  This helps us explain a great deal about the changes from the Tanakh to rabbinic and Messianic views.  Reward and punishment in the afterlife, the existence of the ‘olam ha’ba, the spiritual enemies of demons and the Devil, apocalyptic expectations are examples of ideas that arrived with Hellenism.  After several hundred years of acculturation, they became accepted religious beliefs.  Joel Hoffman remarks:

“Greek influence on Rabbinic Hebrew can be clearly seen in the hundreds of loan words that latter has incorporated.  Many of these Greek words were brought into Rabbinic Hebrew as technical terms, to express concepts that didn’t exist in the Bible.  Examples include the words for both ‘prosecutor’ and ‘defense (lawyer)’: katigor from the Greek katigoros and paraklit from the Greek parakletos, and the word for ‘air,’ avir, from the Greek aer.”[5]

Does this worry you?  Are you upset to think that some of Yeshua’s teaching, or Paul’s letters, or John’s gospel have Greek backgrounds?  How is this any different than the presence of Egyptian ideas in Genesis?  No culture is an isolated island.  If we really want to understand why Moses says what he says, or why Yeshua says what he says, then we will have to look beyond the borders of the tribe to see what influences affected the tribe itself.

Topical Index:  Hellenism, language, Greek, Acts 9:29, Acts 6:1

[1] Martin Hengel, The “Hellenization” of Judea in the First Century after Christ, p. 8.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., p. 9.

[4] https://dornsife.usc.edu/wsrp/copper-scroll/

[5] Joel M. Hoffman, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language (New York University Press, 2004), p. 179.