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Where did the word 'Hebrew' come from?
When did Hebrew become a spoken language?
Is Hebrew a Jewish language?
What is the oldest form of Hebrew?
Hebrew language, Semitic language of the Northern Central group. Spoken in ancient times in Palestine, Hebrew was supplanted by the western dialect of Aramaic beginning about the 3rd century BCE. It was revived as a spoken language in the 19th and 20th centuries and is the official language of Israel.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Hebrew was always regarded as the language of Israel's religion, history and national pride, and after it faded as a spoken language, it continued to be used as a lingua franca among scholars and Jews traveling in foreign countries.
Whatever the truth of the matter, we have to recognize that the exact beginnings of the Hebrew language are still surrounded by mystery. From the moment of its appearance in a documented written form, Hebrew offers clear evidence that it belongs to the Canaanite group of languages, with certain peculiarities of its own.
- Overview
- Hebrew never really died
- Waking the giant
- An unstoppable force
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The religious language that lay dormant for millennia is now global, used by millions of people around the world—including in China.
The Codex Sassoon, the oldest and most complete Hebrew Bible, is set to go to auction this year. Religious texts like this one were a major factor in keeping Hebrew alive for two thousand years.
Today, Hebrew is a thriving language—used by millions of speakers around the world to communicate all their thoughts and desires.
That may have seemed almost impossible less than 150 years ago, when the language was thought to exist only in ancient religious texts.
For some two thousand years, Hebrew lay dormant as Jewish communities scattered across the globe, and adopted the languages of their new homes. By the late 1800s, Hebrew vocabulary was limited to archaic and religious concepts of the Hebrew Bible—and lacked words for everything from “newspaper” and “academia” to “muffin” and “car.”
Here’s a look at the bumpy road to modernizing Hebrew and the debates that surround its continuing evolution today.
The Jewish people were once known as Hebrews for their language, which flourished from roughly the 13th to second centuries B.C.—when the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament, was collected. Hebrew was used in daily life until the second century B.C. at latest, experts believe.
But beginning in the second century B.C., Jewish people became increasingly ostracized and oppressed. Through the rise and fall of Rome, the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and beyond, they were forced to migrate around Europe and adopted the language of the country they were in. They also formed new languages like Yiddish, which mixed Hebrew, German, and Slavic languages.
Still, the Jewish people were known as “People of the Book.” As part of traditions like studying the Torah and reading it aloud, Jews continued to learn Hebrew to read from the Bible and written Hebrew lived on for more than a millennium mostly through religious practice.
There were exceptions: more educated Jews exchanged messages in Hebrew, sometimes between merchants for records of business, says Meirav Reuveny, a Hebrew language historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A 10th-century trove of documents showed that some women, a group generally confined to domestic duties at the time, also wrote letters, exchanged legal documents, and recorded business in Hebrew. From the 10th to 14th centuries, there was an explosion of secular Hebrew poetry in Andalusia, Spain.
In the 19th century, most Jews in Europe were still second-class citizens when a new movement emerged that looked to Hebrew as a way to inspire hope through the Jewish people’s glorious past, Reuveny says. Hebrew revivalists wanted to expand the language beyond the abstract concepts in the Bible—they wanted to use it to talk about modern events, politics, philosophy, and medicine.
Among the leaders of the movement was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, credited as the father of Modern Hebrew.
“One person cannot invent a language,” Reuveny says. “But he makes a good hero, something important for a social movement.”
Ben-Yehuda was born in 1858 in Lithuania, where Jews were heavily discriminated against and violent pogroms terrorized Jewish communities regularly. When Ben-Yehuda traveled to Paris in 1878, he was empowered by the growing Jewish nationalist movement he witnessed there.
He believed Jews needed a country and language to flourish. He moved to Jerusalem in 1881, where he and his wife made the decision to only speak Hebrew—despite missing words for essential modern items and concepts. They raised their son Itamar Ben-Avi to be the first native Hebrew speaker in almost 2,000 years.
In the beginning, Hebrew went through growing pains: the language needed many new words. Ben-Yehuda made a dictionary of new Hebrew words (including מילון, or milon, the word for dictionary). Hebrew newspapers across Europe invented their own words, too, Reuveny says.
Modern Hebrew has changed significantly but still shares clear ties with Biblical Hebrew.
“King David and I could probably understand each other,” says Mirit Bessire, Hebrew language program director at Johns Hopkins University, who points out that it’s not all that different from modern English speakers attempting to understand someone using Shakespearean English.
The growing pains Hebrew experienced as it modernized during Ben-Yehuda’s time are echoed in controversies today. Inclusive language such as non-binary adaptations have proven difficult to adopt as Hebrew is significantly gendered, Reuveny says. Modern words and concepts like “gaslighting” also stir debate about how much outside cultures are affecting the language.
“Language does naturally evolve and grow. It’s inevitable. It’s not in our hands what our language does,” Bessire says.
Language fills the needs of its users, she adds—and today we have more needs than ever as social media and email connect communities of Hebrew speakers far beyond Israel. For example, Bessire says, there are Hebrew communities in China that are not Jewish but have become fluent in the language for business purposes.
“Hebrew is a language of proficiency,” Bessire says. “It's a language that you use for your everyday life, from technology to medicine.”
Learn how Hebrew, once a sacred language of the Bible, was revived by Jewish nationalists and became a modern language used by millions of people. Explore the history, challenges, and controversies of Hebrew language evolution.
- Allie Yang
Learn how Hebrew is a Semitic language that evolved from the original language of man before the Tower of Babel. Explore the biblical and historical evidence of Hebrew from the Creation to the Bar Kochba Revolt.
Jan 10, 2018 · Hebrew is an ancient Semitic language spoken by the Jewish people and one of the world’s oldest living languages. Learn how Hebrew was revived as a spoken language by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and how it is used in Israel and the Diaspora.
Although Hebrew is an 'oriental' language, it is nonetheless closely associated with Western culture as the language of the Bible and was used in writing by the Jews of Europe throughout the Middle Ages. It has also been newly revived in modern times as the language of the State of Israel.
