Greek bilingualism in ancient Judaea-Palaestina

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Bilingualism has always been a key topic in linguistics, and it has an important place for the study ofthe ancient Mediterranean, which was multilingual to the core. Adams' 800-page Bilingualism andthe Latin Language (2003) set a new benchmark for work on ancient language contact. Adamsexamined an immense range of phenomena using current linguistic methodology and giving moreattention to previously underexamined types of evidence.There is no equivalent to Adams' work for Greek, nor can a PhD thesis produce this. However, hisprinciples could be applied profitably to a specific area. Ancient Judaea-Palaestina, in which Greekwas present from the times of Alexander, is the perfect candidate. We have copious survivingevidence from the region for the perceptibly complex ways in which four main languages - Aramaic,Greek, Hebrew and Latin - interacted.We are, indeed, blessed with the number of Greek texts, literary and non-literary, that we have fromthe region. The New Testament and Josephus have received much attention, but there are alsopseudepigraphical texts such as 3 Baruch, while the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae Palaestinae (2010-), nearing completion, provides crucial new access to all the region's inscriptions between Alexanderand Mohammed - the majority of which are in Greek. We have found recently, too, numerousprivate documents in the Judaean desert.Although the linguistic situation of Judaea-Palaestina has been examined in the past, there is nocomprehensive study of Greek bilingualism following modern sociolinguistic principles. In addition,two separate issues have caused the discussion to stagnate. Firstly, it is New Testament scholarswho have produced most of the recent scholarship. However, they focus primarily on the simpleextent of the use of Greek in Galilee to answer whether Jesus spoke Greek. But all of JudaeaPalaestina is worth studying, and we should also not stop at just 'who spoke Greek?'.The second hindrance is the question of the existence of a 'Jewish Greek'. Horsley's 1989 articlecontending that this is a 'fiction' has effectively been treated as the last word on the topic. He notesthat while there is some evidence for above all phonological characteristics of the speech of Jews,this is not enough for it to constitute a 'dialect of its own'. In addition, there are parallels in generalKoine for many of the alleged 'Jewish features' found in especially the Septuagint. Though it is truethat some have exaggerated the distinctiveness of Jewish speech, whether we want to speak of a'separate dialect' - an ill-defined concept - or not is unimportant and arbitrary. It is unfortunate thatthis has stifled research on the Greek of Jews, who constituted the majority in pre-Christian JudaeaPalaestina.Who, then, spoke Greek in ancient Judaea-Palaestina; to whom; how; how learnt; and what they didthink about it? These questions are of great interest for scholars of different types - classicists, NewTestament scholars, Jewish scholars, and linguists - and there is an abundance of material on whichresearch in tune with modern linguistic principles can be carried out.