And for that matter, a very large number of Jews read the Torah in translation, as well. Most Jews don’t read Hebrew very well, and even of those who do, most read some other language better.
There will still be some differences in translation, of course, but I’m not sure that the differences between Jewish and Christian translations are any greater than the differences within each of those religions, aside perhaps from some specific passages which have assumed doctrinal significance.
And for that matter, modern Hebrew isn’t biblical Hebrew.
Which is all fine - but I’ll leave a determination of whether the Pentateuch is the same as the Torah to members of the Jewish faith. Simple claims about the nature of the language or who can read it properly ignore the wider cultural and ceremonial nature of the it. We quickly descend into a form of cultural imperialism where Christians are telling Jews what the Torah is and isn’t.
Though there is a faction of English-speaking fundamentalism that is really hung up on that the “King James” Version is THE divinely-inspired translation and you should distrust any denomination that doesn’t use it. I find them annoying but what can you do.
Speaking as a Jew whose native language is English, i consider “Pentateuch” to be a a Christian word for “Torah”, and i recognize that there are a variety of translations into English, done by people with different priorities. I do keep a Jewish translation around (the Jewish publication society’s “Tanach”) but i also read Christian translations.
Getting back to the question if the OP, my husband’s uncle had a well h developed theory that before the Persian exile, the ancient Hebrews lived in the Caucuses, and the garden of Eden was somewhere in that general area.
It’s pretty close though and a fluent Hebrew speaker can fairly easily understand the Bible in its original form (excepting the parts in Aramaic).
Well, i can testify that i have heard an Israeli read the Torah, and she was clearly reading it, not reciting it.
At Saturday services, usually one or more people read a chunk of the Torah aloud to the congregation. So I’ve heard lots of people read Torah. Heck, i read the Torah aloud at the celebration of my bat mitzvah. And it’s often chanted quite beautifully. But it usually sounds like something memorized. The Israeli read aloud the way you’d read the Gettysburg address. As a familiar text, a beautiful text, but one whose meaning is transparent.
Shakespeare wrote in English, but a lot of the nuances of his writing are not obvious to the run of the mill English speaker today. That includes slang (like “nunnery”, word use and historical context. And modern readings usually don’t even have theologically driven readings.
There has been over 400 years of language evolution between Shakespeare and modern English. But modern Hebrew was revived about 100 years ago based on the biblical language. Come back in 300 years and perhaps Israelis will start to feel that the biblical language is no longer quite so transparent.
It’s not like Hebrew disappeared for 2,000 years and more. And a lot of translation issues would involve idioms obvious to the speaker at the time but unclear to us today. I suspect the modern Hebrew speaker would have trouble understanding a non-Biblical passage that assume knowledge of how households work, just as we don’t understand Shakespearean slang without the aid of helpful notes.
It kind of did disappear. It was a dead language, until it was intentionally revived by a couple of scholars who raised a child speaking what has become modern Hebrew.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Making of Modern Hebrew | My Jewish Learning
No, that’s exactly what happened. It was akin to Latin in that it was used for religious services but no one spole it conversationally, until Eliezer Ben Yehuda (a Russian Jew) ran into a Jew from Jerusalem (then Ottoman) and was able to communicate with him. That gave him the idea of reviving Hebrew, at which point he created the Academy of the Hebrew Language. They took biblical Hebrew, figured out where gaps were, reconstructed those words as best they could using roots from related languages (both dead ones like Phonecian, as well as live ones like Arabic), invented new words for things that didn’t exist in the past, and called it good.
It was an amazing project, and its success is truly unique and astounding. However, it does mean that there is some debate over some translations. The lists of Kosher animals is a great example. There are a handful of named animals (especially birds) whose identity is controversial. So modern Hebrew takes the view that the Academy went with, which means if you ask an Israeli (who could read the passage with no issue as quickly as they read the paper) what animals are being referred too, they’d be able to give you a clear answer - but that answer is based on the (well researched but not always without controversy) decision the Academy made, not on 2,000 years of universal agreement among Jewish communities.
My prior cites were long (but included the anecdote Babale discussed.) Here’s a shorter cite that makes it clear that Hebrew was a dead language, read by scholars, and not spoken by anyone, until it was revived in modern Israel.
That’s what I meant by not disappearing, unlike really ancient languages which no one has ever heard. I’m quite aware no one spoke Hebrew over this time. And remember, my point was that nuances familiar to the ancient speakers would be lost on us today, which makes understanding what was intended by the Bible writers a bit trickier than just picking up the Hebrew with a knowledge of modern Hebrew.
I’m not a linguist, but it’s my understanding that the term “dead language” properly refers to a language that nobody any more knows, not just one that’s only known to scholars or clergy. So Latin isn’t a dead language, and Hebrew wasn’t a dead language, but Etruscan, for instance, is: We can make some guesses about Etruscan based on elements of Latin that derived from it, but the full language is lost irrecoverably.
My understanding is that dead language is one that no one uses as their native tongue. Usually that means they didn’t grow up speaking it. Which makes Latin and Ancient Hebrew dead languages. The modern revival of Hebrew would be a different, albeit very closely related, language which is not dead.
So it was mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there’s usually only one thing you can do - go through its pockets for loose vocabulary.
The common usage of “dead language” has for centuries included both extinct or disappeared languages, as well as those languages, as it were, “embalmed under glass”, not the actively evolving tongue of a society – thus, “dead” in the sense of no longer naturally vital and preserved only as objects of study.
One position on the distinction:
In linguistics, a dead language is (usually) defined as a language that some people still use, even if there are no native speakers left.
Latin is probably the most widely known dead language. No one speaks it as their everyday language anymore, but it’s still studied for academic purposes, and it teaches us a lot about other commonly spoken languages that are still in use.
An extinct language, on the other hand, is worse than a dead one.
It’s a language no one bothers to study at all. This can be the case for small, locally-spoken languages that die out but it’s also true of many ancient languages that we just don’t have the information we need to learn.
In those cases, all we have are a few surviving fragments. The rest is lost forever.
Linky no worky. Nothing useful, anyway.
Thank you, disabled the link embedded in my quote, future readers may go to the linked article to see if their link comes back to life. FWIW the line does sound a bit too absolute to me. I’d say it should be more along the lines of “nobody is able to relearn to use” (since I suppose you can study the fragments to see what if anything you can learn from them), and that in both cases we may want to add the qualifier “currently with the available knowledge”.