Biblical Hebrew ( or ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanitic branch of the Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea. The term was not used as the language in the Hebrew Bible, which was referred to as or , but was used in Koine Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts.
Paleo-Hebrew is attested in inscriptions from about the 10th century BCE, when it was almost identical to Phoenician and other Canaanite languages, and spoken Hebrew persisted as a first language through and beyond the Second Temple period, which ended in 70 CE with the siege of Jerusalem. It eventually developed into Mishnaic Hebrew, which was employed as a second language until the 5th century.
The language of the Hebrew Bible reflects various stages of the Hebrew language in its consonantal skeleton, as well as the Tiberian vocalization system added in the Middle Ages by the Masoretes. There is evidence of regional dialectal variation, including differences between the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah. The consonantal text, called the Masoretic Text ("𝕸"), was transmitted in manuscript form and underwent redaction and modernization in the Second Temple period, but its earliest portions (parts of Amos, Isaiah, Hosea and Micah) can be dated to the late 8th to early 7th centuries BCE.
Biblical Hebrew has several different writing systems. From around the 12th century BCE until the 6th century BCE, writers used the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. This system was retained by the Samaritans, who use a descendant, the Samaritan script, to this day. However, the Imperial Aramaic alphabet gradually displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet after the Babylonian captivity, and became the source for the current Hebrew alphabet. These scripts lack letters to represent all of the sounds of Biblical Hebrew, although these sounds are reflected in Greek and Latin transcriptions/translations of the time. They initially indicated only consonants, but certain letters, known by the Latin term , became increasingly used to mark vowels. In the Middle Ages, various systems of diacritics were developed to mark the vowels in Hebrew manuscripts; of these, only the Tiberian vocalization is still widely used.
Biblical Hebrew possessed a series of emphatic consonants whose precise articulation (pronunciation) is disputed, likely ejective or possibly pharyngealized. Earlier Biblical Hebrew had three consonants that were not distinguished in the writing system and later merged with other consonants. The stop consonants developed fricative allophones under the influence of Aramaic, and these sounds (the "begadkefat consonants") eventually became marginally phonemic. The pharyngeal and glottal consonants underwent weakening in some regional dialects, as reflected, for example, in the modern Samaritan Hebrew reading tradition. The vowel system of Hebrew underwent changes over time and is reflected differently in Koine Greek and Latin transcriptions, medieval vocalization systems, and modern reading traditions.
Premodern Hebrew had a typically Semitic nonconcatenative morphology, arranging roots into patterns to form words. Biblical Hebrew distinguished two grammatical genders (masculine and feminine), and three numbers (singular, plural, and the uncommon dual). Verbs were marked for voice and mood, and had two conjugations that may have indicated aspect or tense. The tense or aspect of verbs was also influenced by the conjunction , the "waw-consecutive" construction. The default word order for Biblical Hebrew was verb–subject–object (unlike Modern Hebrew), and verbs were inflected for the number, gender, and person of their subject. Pronominal suffixes could be appended to verbs to indicate object or nouns to indicate possession, and nouns had special construct states for use in possessive constructions.
Nomenclature The earliest written sources refer to Biblical Hebrew as 'the language of Canaan'. The Hebrew Bible also calls the language 'Judaean, Judahite' In the Hellenistic period, Greek writings use the names Hebraios, HebraïstiJosephus, Antiquities I, 1:2, etc. and in Mishnaic Hebrew we find 'Hebrew' and 'Hebrew language'.Mishnah Gittin 9:8, etc. The origin of this term is obscure; suggested origins include the biblical Eber, the ethnonyms ʿApiru, Ḫabiru, and Ḫapiru found in sources from ancient Egypt and West Asia, and a derivation from the root 'to pass', alluding to crossing over the Jordan River. Jews also began referring to Hebrew as 'the Holy Tongue' in Mishnaic Hebrew.
The term "Classical Hebrew" may encompass all pre-medieval dialects of Hebrew, including Mishnaic Hebrew, or it may be limited to Hebrew contemporary with the Hebrew Bible. The term Biblical Hebrew refers to pre-Mishnaic dialects (sometimes excluding the language of the Dead Sea Scrolls); it may or may not include extra-biblical texts, such as inscriptions like the Siloam inscription, and generally also includes later vocalization traditions for the Hebrew Bible's consonantal text, most commonly the early medieval Tiberian vocalization.
History
The archeological record for the prehistory of Biblical Hebrew is far more complete than the record of Biblical Hebrew itself. Early Northwest Semitic (ENWS) materials are attested from 2350 BCE to 1200 BCE, the end of the Bronze Age. The Northwest Semitic languages, including Hebrew, differentiated noticeably during the Iron Age (1200–540 BCE), although in its earliest stages Biblical Hebrew was not highly differentiated from Ugaritic and the Canaanite of the Amarna letters.
Hebrew developed during the latter half of the second millennium BCE between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, an area known as Canaan. The Deuteronomic history says the Israelites established a unified kingdom in Canaan at the beginning of the first millennium BCE, which later split into the kingdom of Israel in the north and the kingdom of Judah in the south after a disputed succession.
In 722 BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire destroyed Israel and some Israelite elites () escaped to the Kingdom of Judah, which was made a client state of the Empire. In 586 BCE, the Neo-Babylonian Empire destroyed Judah. The Judahites were exiled, and Solomon's Temple was destroyed.
Later, the Achaemenid Empire made former Judah a province, Yehud Medinata, and permitted the Judahite exiles to return and repopulate the land and aided the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. According to the Gemara, Hebrew of this Second Temple period was similar to Imperial Aramaic; Hanina bar Hama said that God sent the exiled Jews to Babylon because "their language, Aramaic, is similar to the language of the Torah." ( Pesahim 87b:20).
Aramaic became the common language in the north, in Galilee and Samaria. Hebrew remained in use in Judah, but the returning exiles brought back Aramaic influence, and Aramaic was used for communicating with other ethnic groups during the Persian period. Alexander the Great conquered Judah in 332 BCE. During the subsequent Hellenistic period, Judea became independent under the Hasmonean dynasty and conquered nearby regions: Perea, Samaria, Idumea, Galilee, and Iturea. Later, the Roman Republic ended their independence, making Herod the Great their ruler, and it was made the province of Judaea in 6 CE.
A revolt against the Romans led to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and the second Bar Kokhba revolt in 132–135 led to the purge and expulsion of the Jewish population of Judea, the establishment of a new province of Syria Palaestina, and the rebuilding of Jerusalem as the Roman colonia of Aelia Capitolina.
Roman-era Hebrew, called Tannaitic Hebrew, ceased being spoken about 200 CE and developed into the literary language of the later Mishnaic Hebrew of the Amoraim. Hebrew continued to be used as a literary and liturgical language in the form of Medieval Hebrew. The revival of the Hebrew language as a vernacular began in the 19th century, culminating in Modern Hebrew becoming the official language of Israel. Currently, Classical Hebrew is generally taught in public schools in Israel, and Biblical Hebrew forms are sometimes used in Modern Hebrew literature, much as archaic and biblical constructions are used in English literature. Since Modern Hebrew contains many biblical elements, Biblical Hebrew is fairly intelligible to Modern Hebrew speakers.
The primary source of Biblical Hebrew material is the Hebrew Bible. Epigraphic materials from the area of Israelite territory are written in a form of Hebrew called Inscriptional Hebrew, although this is meagerly attested.: "The extrabiblical linguistic material from the Iron Age is primarily epigraphic, that is, texts written on hard materials (pottery, stones, walls, etc.). The epigraphic texts from Israelite territory are written in Hebrew in a form of the language which may be called Inscriptional Hebrew; this "dialect" is not strikingly different from the Hebrew preserved in the Masoretic text. Unfortunately, it is meagerly attested." According to Waltke & O'Connor, Inscriptional Hebrew "is not strikingly different from the Hebrew preserved in the Masoretic text." The damp climate of Israel caused the rapid deterioration of papyrus and parchment documents, in contrast to the dry environment of Egypt, and the survival of the Hebrew Bible may be attributed to scribal determination in preserving the text through copying. No manuscript of the Hebrew Bible dates to before 400 BCE, although two silver rolls (the Ketef Hinnom scrolls) from the seventh or sixth century BCE show a version of the Priestly Blessing. Vowel and cantillation marks were added to the older consonantal layer of the Bible between 600 CE and the beginning of the 10th century.This is known because the final redaction of the Talmud, which does not mention these additions, was , while dated manuscripts with vocalization are found in the beginning of the tenth century. See The scholars who preserved the pronunciation of the Bibles were known as the Masoretes. The most well-preserved system that was developed, and the only one still in religious use, is the Tiberian vocalization, but both Babylonian and Palestinian vocalizations are also attested. The Palestinian system was preserved mainly in piyyutim, which contain biblical quotations.
Classification
+Development of the various fricatives in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic Proto-Semitic Hebrew Aramaic Arabic Examples Hebrew Aramaic Arabic meaning *ḏ 'gold''male' *z 'scale''time' *s 'knife' *ś 'ten''moon/month' *š 'year''peace' *ṯ 'three''two' *ṱ 'shadow''noon' *ṣ́ 'land''laughed' *ṣ 'shout''watermelon-like plant' *ḫ 'five''shout' *ḥ 'salt''dream' *ġ 'raven''west' *ʻ 'slave''seven'
Biblical Hebrew is a Northwest Semitic language from the Canaanite subgroup.
As Biblical Hebrew evolved from the Proto-Semitic language it underwent a number of consonantal mergers parallel with those in other Canaanite languages.However it is noteworthy that Akkadian shares many of these sound shifts but is less closely related to Hebrew than Aramaic. See There is no evidence that these mergers occurred after the adaptation of the Hebrew alphabet.However, for example, when Old Aramaic borrowed the Canaanite alphabet it still had interdentals, but marked them with what they merged with in Canaanite. For instance 'ox' was written but pronounced with an initial . The same phenomenon also occurred when the Arabs adopted the Nabatean alphabet. See .