[Mesorah] At/Atah

[R Davidovich]

Wow.  I remembered that Rashi all wrong.  The correct version supports my
point more than the phantom Rashi I imagined.

I thought the Chazal was about Adam Harishon, which could conceivably lead a
person to conclude that Hebrew is the literal first language, which led to
my counter-argument that this is no reason to think that it must also be the
origin of all post-Mabul languages.

However, Chazal say even less than that.  The claim, which is pure Medrash
that has no practical human language conclusion, is that Hashem created the
world with Hebrew.  That has NOTHING to do with the development of languages
in the history of Olam Hazeh.  It is entirely plausible to suggest that
while from a aggedeta point of view, Hebrew was the "language" that made
Creation, Hebrew as a human language evolved and developed in a manner
similar to all other languages.

Raphael Davidovich

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 7:09 PM, kennethgmiller at juno.com <
kennethgmiller at juno.com> wrote:

> R' Michael Hamm wrote:
> > That's nice from a linguist's point of view, but I thought
> > we hold that Hebrew was spoken before any other language?
> > See Rashi, B'reshis 2:23.
>
> R' Raphael Davidovich responded:
> > Just because Chazal midrashically identify the language of
> > the Torah as the language of Adam Harishon does not mean it
> > is the historical origin language of all other languages.
>
> Chazal do far more than merely "identify the language of the Torah as the
> language of Adam Harishon". The Rashi which RMH said to look at says, "Mikan
> shenivra haolam bilshon hakodesh", which I would translate as, "From here we
> know that Lashon Hakodesh was used to create the world."
>
> In other words, Rashi is saying that Hebrew existed before the world. This
> does not necessarily preclude the concurrent (whatever that means in this
> context) existence of other languages, but it *would* preclude the
> possibility of Hebrew developing from them.
>
> OTOH, I suppose there could be those who disagree with this Rashi.
>
> Akiva Miller
>
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-- 
RD
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