The Rise of Written Vernaculars
Hebrew as a New Possibility
The existence of Hebrew writing, and the resulting possibility of a written account of Israel, has been largely taken for granted. We assume that, once they reached a certain level of development, it would be natural for Israelites to use the language they spoke to write about themselves. But the very idea that each people should have its own written language, let alone its own history, turns out to be a parochial assumption with a very limited basis in the ancient Near East. Only with the rise of European nation-states in the eighteenth century did the idea of national literatures spread: that the French should speak and write French or the Germans speak and write German. In most documented times and places, including the ancient Near East, writing, speech, and political order did not have any necessary relationship with each other.
Not only did people in the Iron Age Levant not expect to write their own languages; history was not suppose to be about them. Previous historical narratives centered on kings, so that the idea of writing the history of a people would hardly have been natural. Indeed, there is no evidence that Israel's cultural ancestors had any interest in this topic. As Mark S. Smith pointed out, among the varied and abundant texts produces by early West Semitic-speaking city-states of the Levant, we find no evidence of histories or chronicles. This despite the fact that these city-states were intimately familiar with Mesopotamian high culture, where chronicles and historical inscriptions had long been central. But Mesopotamian history was for kings; collective groups played a marginal role as docile subjects or hostile marauders.
The Bible's impact requires us to consider the deliberate writing down of Hebrew as a significant historical event. The invention of Hebrew opened up possibilities at once linguistic and political: a literature could now be both addressed to, and written about, a people. ...
