Finding ‘language’ in the Hebrew Bible

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v10i1.5877

Keywords:

language, Biblical exegesis, historical change in meaning

Abstract

In the Hebrew Bible, lashon [לָשׁוֹן] and safah [שָׂפָה] are both translated as ‘language’. In Genesis 10, survivors of the flood went their separate ways each according to their lashon. In Chapter 11, the builders of the Tower of Babel all spoke the same safah. Focusing on lashon, it changes radically over the Biblical millennium. From ~1400 BCE, lashon describes ways in which individuals speak. By 550-450 BCE, it was synonymous with ‘nation’ or ‘people’ and used in a manner more familiar to us today.

Author Biography

  • Stanley Dubinsky, University of South Carolina, Columbia

    Professor of Linguistics

    Department of English Language and Literature

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Published

2025-04-09

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2025): Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Stanley Dubinsky

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.

How to Cite

Dubinsky, Stanley. 2025. “Finding ‘language’ in the Hebrew Bible”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 10 (1): 5877. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v10i1.5877.