Linguistic criticism

Linguistic Criticism is probably the oldest form of biblical criticism or textual criticism to develop. It relies heavily upon the study and knowledge of the Biblical languages - not just Κοινη Greek and Hebrew, but also Aramaic (the language Jesus Himself most likely spoke) and Egyptian (Moses' mother tongue).

Besides the influence that Aramaic and Egyptian would have on particular texts, i.e. the words we have written down in the extant Hebrew and Greek manuscripts being shaped into that form after first being contrived in the minds of writers whose mother tongues were Aramaic and Egyptian, we also have portions of texts written directly in those languages.

There are numerous Egyptian loanwords in the Torah (Moses' writings). For instance, in the account of Moses being placed in the river in an ark (basket) behind the bullrushes (Sh'mot/Exodus 2:3), the words for ark, river, and bullrushes are all transliterated into Hebrew from Egyptian. Yahuda counts at least eighteen Egyptian loanwords in the full account of Moses’ infancy. Large sections of Daniel and Ezra, as well as portions of Jeremiah and Nehemiah are written directly in Aramaic, as well as a few phrases found in the Synoptic Gospels and the Pauline epistles.

Linguistic criticism is not the same as textual criticism, though it does fall under that discipline. Where textual criticism may examine phenomena that occur within a single language, like elision, and even the likelihood of scribal error in recording what is dictated to him; linguistic criticism specifically inspects how languages affect one another in the process of translating from one to another, and how a language changes over time, psycholinguistically and aurally.

Tice gives a thorough explanation of the discipline, stating:

"Linguistic criticism endeavors to explore a text and the effects that elements of language have upon it. One method might be comparing pre-vowel-pointing Hebrew renderings of the Torah to transliterated Hebrew words in the Septuagint Proper to study how the Hebrew would have been pronounced or how it compares with later Hebrew. In so doing, the linguistic critic may determine which psycholinguistic elements of the source language influence the rendering in a language not primary to the author, or the grammatical structure of the language and how its structure may affect interpretation of the text.

Different languages have different ways of conveying an idea, and one of the aims of linguistic criticism is to determine what idea, specifically, the author is trying to transmit through the text. This often involves pinpointing the source of the linguistic device used, whether an idiom or a loanword or a new word of the author’s own invention. If it is a loanword, the source language will shed light on its meaning; as would be the case for idioms. Idiomatic expressions and authorial inventions also relate information about the source culture and its customs and traditions."

A scholar employing linguistic criticism would look at a passage such as Matthew 27: 46/Mark 15:34, which the Greek text renders as "My God, My God! Why have you deserted Me?" (CJB), and instead of blindly accepting the Greek rendering of the Aramaic words Jesus spoke on the execution stake, would look to the Aramaic language for the meaning of that passage and discover that the Greek mistranlated it and that the correct interpretation is, in fact, "My God, My God! For this moment I have been spared!" or "My God, My God! This is my destination!" It would be immediately obvious from a study of the Aramaic passage that the word in the text "shabaktani" does not mean forsaken or deserted (that word would be nashatani); it means spared or destined.