I don’t subscribe to the Sapir-Whorf thesis. I think it is a mistake to make the connection between thought and language causal. It is as reasonable to believe that experience causes language to be the way that it is as it is to claim that language causes us to experience as we do. Each is as reasonable an explanation as the other, but Benjamin Whorf chose the latter over the former though there is no reason to do so. His mistake, I think, was to try to turn correlation into causation.

So, though I wouldn’t agree that Jewish philosophical thinking was hampered by its grammar, I do think that it was different than Greek philosophy (something with which I presume no one would argue) and that the differences were concomitant with differences in language (the arguable point). Language is concomitant with our experience of the world because the two are indissociable, not because one causes the other. I need to look, however, at J. Barr. It looks like his criticism goes beyond merely disagreeing with the Sapir-Whorf thesis.

“Another popular linguistic theory, known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, also tended to distract from a rigorous consideration of semantics. This hypothesis also influenced some theological thinking. “Sapir–Whorfâ€? is defined by its principal advocate as follows:

“We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.�

But the notion that differences in worldview are somehow imposed by the “linguistic systems in our minds� has largely been discredited both by the failure to support this idea with actual language evidence and the regrettable consequences of assuming that intellectual superiority is achieved by an ethnocentric language system.

It was sometimes argued that Jewish philosophical thinking was hampered by the limitations of Hebrew as a language for speculative thought. But Arabic, and ultimately Hebrew, philosophy flourished, adapting syntax and vocabulary to meet their needs. J. Barr’s well-known criticism of the assumed contrast between Greek speculative and Hebrew concrete-image thought has countered, for example, the conclusions of T. Boman in his Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek.“

Walter R. Bodine and Monica S. Devens, Revell, E.J., Greenstein, Edward L., Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 1992, 1998), 126.

They refer you to J. Barr’s The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), which I also haven’t read yet, but is in my pile next to me on the desk. Barr lists Boman in about 10 different places in the index. Choosing one reference at random, I found the following.

“Boman’s kind of interpretation of the language… depends to a great extent on the logico-grammatical unclarities of the older [Hebrew] grammars and evaporates with the stricter method of modern linguistics. We may summarize then by saying that Boman has not succeeded in his attempt to relate teh nominal sentence in Hebrew to the Hebrew mode of thinking in totatlities and not making distinctions.” p. 67.

I’m looking forward to the OT this year :)