What is the difference between Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew?

Answer 1

Modern Hebrew is closer to Biblical Hebrew than Modern English is to, say, Old English. The Torah's language sounds a little archaic, but it can be understood by a modern Hebrew speaker, whereas to a modern English speaker Beowulf is gibberish. (Hwæt wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum þēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnon hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaþena þrēatum monegum mægþum meodo-setla oftēah egsian eorl syððan ǣrest weorþan.)

The decline of spoken HebrewUnlike English or other languages which have been spoken continuously over centuries and evolved naturally, Hebrew was not a language used in everyday speech by Jews after the Assyrian and Babylonian empires conquered the kingdoms of Israel and Judea in the 8th to 6th centuries B.C.E. Jews began speaking Aramaic, which was a common language of those empires. Aramaic is related to Hebrew and Arabic but distinct from both.

Hebrew was still used as the language of the Torah and worship, and in scholarly writing (just like European scholars used Latin for centuries after Latin disappeared as a vernacular language in the former Roman Empire) in addition to Aramaic (e.g. Kaddish, a common Jewish prayer, is still recited in Aramaic). However, in everyday speech, Jews spoke the languages that were around them:

Aramaic in the ancient Middle East - Jesus most likely spoke Aramaic;

Late Greek - many Jews lived in the Eastern Roman Empire, where Greek was common;

Arabic in places like modern day Iraq and North Africa - the Jewish scholar Maimonides wrote in Arabic with Hebrew letters in many of his famous books.

Yiddish in Central and Eastern Europe - Yiddish is similar to German, but written with Hebrew letters.

Ladino in Spain/Portugal/Morocco - Ladino is a dialect of Spanish, written in either Hebrew or Roman letters

and English in the British Empire and the United States, where Jews still flourish.

The Rebirth of Spoken Hebrew

In the 19th century the Zionist movement began to gain popularity among European Jews. Zionism is a nationalist movement which held that the Jews would be safe from anti-semitism and able to prosper if they had a homeland and a national identity of their own, as opposed to living in host countries as a minority group.

Decades before Israel existed as a modern state, Eliezer Perlman, aka Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a scholar, linguist and newspaper editor in Russia, promoted the revival of Hebrew as a modern language for Jews and a future Jewish nation. Because Hebrew hadn't been spoken regularly in over 2000 years, Ben-Yehuda set out to create new Hebrew words to represent modern concepts, and created new grammatical rules influenced by modern European languages so that Jews could more easily learn the language.

He borrowed words and grammatical forms from related languages like Arabic and newer Jewish languages like Yiddish to fill in the gaps, as well as inventing new words by combining or deriving words from ancient Hebrew. He published the first dictionary of Modern Hebrew and helped create the Academy of the Hebrew Language.

Jews living in the British territory of Palestine and the Transjordan started to learn and develop Modern Hebrew. When Britain ceded the territory and Jews founded the State of Israel in part of the former territory, Modern Hebrew became the primary language and one of the official languages of Israel.

Biblical Hebrew compared with Modern Hebrew

Is Modern Hebrew like ancient Hebrew? Yes and no. The best analogy would be if the descendants of Roman citizens banded together and tried to reconstruct Latin as the official language of a new Roman nation. No one has spoken Latin as a conversational language in over 1000 years, and so it hasn't developed as other languages have.

Latin linguists might take much of the vocabulary of imperial Latin or church Latin and borrow other words from Spanish, Italian, French, or other European languages for concepts that didn't exist in the Roman Empire. They might also alter the grammar to resemble the grammar of modern Romance languages.

The old Latin name for the Senate and People of Rome: "SENATVS POPVLVSQVE ROMANUS" might be rendered, for instance, as "Ille Senatus et Populus de Roma," adding common grammatical concepts like definite objects ('ille') and standard prepositional phrases ('de Roma').

Modern Hebrew similarly creates new grammatical forms which are different from those of Biblical Hebrew:

Possessive SuffixesIn Biblical Hebrew, to show possession you would add a suffix to the noun. So from ספר sefer (book) we get ספרי sifri (my book), ספרך sifrecha(your book), ספרוsifro (his book), etc. This is fairly common in literary modern Hebrew, but in spoken Hebrew we add the suffix to the preposition של Shel (of) and put it after the noun: הספר שלי ha-sefer sheli (the book of mine), הספר שלך ha-sefer shelcha, הספר שלו ha-sefer shelo, etc. VerbsIn Biblical Hebrew there weren't always past, future, and present verbs as most modern languages have. Whether a verb referred to the past or future could sometimes depend on context. For instance, יאמר yomer "he says/said/will say" might mean "he said" if preceded by the letter vav ו ('and') at the beginning of the sentence (i.e. ויאמר vayomer ("And he said") is a common construction at the beginning of sentences in the Torah.

By contrast, Modern Hebrew has distinct past and future tenses. יאמר yomer in Modern Hebrew only means "he will say." The past, "he said," is rendered as אמר amar.

The present tense in Modern Hebrew is identical to the participle form of the verb in both Modern and Biblical Hebrew. שומר shomer can mean either "he guards" as a verb, or "guard" as a noun.

Word OrderIn Biblical Hebrew, sentences usually began with the verb, followed by the subject and the object. In Modern Hebrew, by contrast, sentences usually start with the subject, followed by the verb and then the object, like most modern European languages. VocabularyMany objects and abstract concepts (like computers or democracy) which are commonplace in the modern world did not exist in Biblical times, and therefore Modern Hebrew has had to borrow words from other languages or create its own new words.

Examples

רדיו radio - radio

טלויזיה televiziya - television

דמוקרטיה demoqratia - democracy

קולנוע qolnoa - cinema (from the Hebrew קול qol 'voice' and נוע noa'motion')

בינלאמי beinleumi - international (from the Hebrew בין bein 'between' and לאמ/אמ om/le'om 'people' or 'nation')

There are about 25 or 30 major differences in grammar and usage, but beyond that, the difference is mainly in vocabulary.

Some grammar differences:

• Ancient Hebrew uses suffixes to indicate possessive pronouns. Modern Hebrew uses them sparingly, and prefers a separate pronoun word for possessive pronouns. Modern Hebrew uses the word Shel (of) to form possessions. Shel does not really exist in Ancient Hebrew.
• The Ancient Hebrew word for "and" (veh) is a prefix, and changes depending on the next letter after it (veh, vah, vee, or oo). In Modern Hebrew, It may change in some expressions and formal writing, but generally it remains "veh".
• Ancient Hebrew generally puts the verb as the first word in the sentence, especially if the verb has the prefix veh (and) attached to it. Modern Hebrew rarely does this.
• When veh (and) is attached to a verb, the verb changes from past tense to future tense, and vice versa. This never happens in Modern Hebrew.

It is important to note that there are far fewer differences between Ancient Hebrew and Modern Hebrew than there are between Shakespearean English and Modern English (even though in English that is a timefram of only 400 years, whereas in Hebrew it's a difference of about 2500 years). This is because modern English has had all 400 years to evolve, whereas Modern Hebrew has only existed for about 100 years.

Answer 2

Modern Hebrew is much closer to Biblical Hebrew than today's English is to Shakespearean English (Early Modern English). This despite the fact that there are about 2500 years between Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew, and only about 400 years between us and Shakespeare.

This is because during the last 2500 years or so, Hebrew evolved much more slowly than English did, because Hebrew was no longer a constantly spoken language during this time. It was preserved mainly in writing, and used in prayer and Torah study.

In the 1880's, the Modern Hebrew language was "artificially" revived by Eliezer ben-Yehuda. The basis for the modern language was the Torah.

The Torah's language sounds a little archaic, but is easily understood by Israelis, as young as age 9. Shakespearean English is usually taught starting in Middle School or High School, and can be challenging.

Here are some main differences between Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew:

1. Conversive Vav (when a Biblical verb has the word "and" in front of it, it seems to change from past tense to future tense or vice versa. This is an oversimplification, but the point is that this doesn't occur in Modern Hebrew.)
   
2. Use of suffixes for object pronouns in Biblical Hebrew (occurs in Modern Hebrew, but not as common)
   
3. Verb Tenses (same structure, but slightly different meanings. For example, the future tense in Modern Hebrew was perceived as "incomplete action" in Biblical Hebrew)
4. Vocabulary (Hardly anyone uses the word Ephod אפוד today, and the ancient Hebrews didn't know what a kilometer קילומטר was).

Note: The answer below by Yaletiger is a bit more extreme: it compares Modern English to Old English, which are completely different languages. Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew are mutually intelligible.