ABSTRACT
The Mishnah is a codification of rabbinic oral law compiled c. 200 CE by Rabbi Judah the Prince. The language of the Mishnah is a different variety of Hebrew to BH. It is often called Mishnaic Hebrew, in the same way that the language of the Hebrew Bible is called BH. MH is widely considered to represent a living, spoken dialect that survived until c. 200 CE. The fact that MH is attested in late, post biblical sources, i.e. the Mishnah and other Tannaitic literature, has often been treated as providing a fixed point in plotting the linguistic evolution of Hebrew. In older scholarship, MH was assumed to be what Hebrew became in the post biblical period, showing us the end point of the linguistic developments of the biblical period. This chapter considers three of the most characteristic elements of MH: the relative pronoun (BH), the first person common plural independent pronoun (BH), and the feminine singular demonstrative pronoun (BH).
