(Ivrit). A Semitic language traditionally described as "the Holy Tongue" (leshon ha-kodesh). The oldest Semitic languages known are Eblaite in northern Syria and Akkadian (Babylonian and Assyrian) in Mesopotamia, attested in writing from the third millennium BCE. Closer to Hebrew is Ugaritic, the language of Ugarit, a coastal city in northern Syria, with literary and other texts from the mid-14th century. The language of Canaan, the earlier name of Erets Israel, is known from Canaanite words and forms in the Akkadian (then a lingua franca) of letters written to the Egyptian governor of Canaan in the 14th century BCE. This Canaanite resembles Hebrew closely, and some scholars held that biblical Hebrew was Canaanite with an admixture of the language the Israelites spoke before entering Canaan.
One of the earliest texts in Hebrew is the Song of Deborah (Judg. 5); there are some archaic forms in other early poems, as well as instances of dialect (e.g., Judg. 12:6). The classical literary Hebrew of the Bible was probably created in the era of King Solomon, when a regular administration was established and people from all parts of the country came on festivals to the Temple in Jerusalem, where they were addressed by priests and "wise men." This is the language in which the prose texts of the pre-exilic era are cast. Poetry, as exemplified by the Psalms, had its own style and vocabulary, and the speeches of the Prophets represent a rhetorical style; both are marked by "parallelism," the repetition of a statement in different words.
The latest books of the Bible, such as Ecclesiastes, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and probably Chronicles, display a later form of biblical Hebrew, based perhaps on the official language of royal administration. After the Babylonian
During the Second Temple period, the teaching of religion was assumed by the tannaim, who used the spoken language of the time. It differed in grammar, syntax, and vocabulary from biblical Hebrew, and was called "the language of the wise men." In this period, when local synagogues came into being, prayers such as the Amidah were composed in a Hebrew close to the spoken language. This stage is called Mishnaic Hebrew after the Mishnah, which consists largely of statements and discussions by individual rabbis.
In Ortiental Jewish communities a traditional way of pronouncing the text of the Mishnah and other halakhic (legal) collections of that period has been preserved, with some regional differences. Mishnaic Hebrew was used for religious texts throughout the Middle Ages and it was influenced by the various languages which Jews spoke in different areas (e.g., Judeo-Arabic). The Mishnaic language became an important element in modern Hebrew, because it provided words and phrases for everyday life.
The traditional attitude to the early beginnings of Hebrew emerges from a Midrash (Gen. R. 18:6) on Genesis 2:23: "She shall be called Woman (ishah), because she was taken out of the Man (ish). From this one learns that the Torah was given in the Holy Tongue. Because only in Hebrew (ish, ishah) do the words correspond." The Holy Tongue was the usual designation for Hebrew, and it was even seen as the language of the angels (Ḥag. 16a). Furthermore, according to the rabbis, one who made it his practice to speak Hebrew would have a share in the afterlife (TJ Shab. 1:2, Shek. 3:4).
In the Middle Ages, Jewish scholars thought that Aramaic and Arabic, two other Semitic languages, were corrupt Hebrew. They claimed that Hebrew was the original Semitic tongue and that historical changes in a language are not, as is now recognized, developments caused by social and cultural innovations and influences. On the other hand, Jewish scholars in Morocco and Muslim Spain used Aramaic and Arabic words in order to establish the meaning of difficult biblical terms.
Although Hebrew ceased to be an everyday language, with Jews speaking other vernaculars, it did not disappear from Jewish life. The prayer services continued to be mainly in Hebrew and, in the course of time, many special prayers, liturgical poems (piyyutim), and songs were added, again mostly in Hebrew. A Jew was obliged to study the weekly Torah portion twice in Hebrew and once in the Targum. Study of the Mishnah was widespread, and other halakhic and moral books written over the centuries were widely read. Most of the commentaries to the Bible, from the Middle Ages, were in Hebrew, so that adult Bible study meant a twofold occupation with the meaning of Hebrew texts: the biblical wording and the commentaries.
As was the case in other Oriental civilizations, learning to write and to handle the written language was restricted to males. At the same time, the languages which all Jews spoke (see Jewish Languages) were absorbing a large number of Hebrew words. As for boys, Sifré (Ekev 46) said, "If a father does not speak to his son in the Holy Tongue, it is as if he had buried him" (Tos. to Ḥag.1:2). In accordance with this principle, Jewish communities, however small or isolated, invested in engaging a teacher, and boys of three years and upward were kept for long hours every weekday, learning to read and to translate word for word. There was no teaching of grammar, which was dismissed by Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews until modern times, and the select few who wrote books in Hebrew did so in a form taken mainly from Mishnaic Hebrew, but in a syntax that was influenced by the language of their country, often with literal translation of words from that language. Such is the case with Rashi, though he wrote a more elegant Hebrew than other Ashkenazim of his time and developed a grammatical system of his own for the analysis of biblical sentences. Yet when explaining words in the Bible and the Talmud, he frequently supplies an Old French equivalent in Hebrew transliteration instead of attempting to define the sense in Hebrew .
The Jewish scholars of the later Middle Ages lived among nations that had not yet begun to analyze their own languages or to use them for scientific writing, medieval Latin being utilized instead. There was little that Jewish writers could learn from their host nations. One exceptional influence can be seen in the medieval German chivalrous narrative poems, some of which were transcribed into Hebrew letters .
The situation was quite different in those areas of Spain occupied at the time by the Muslims. In Arabic there was then---as there still is today---a clear distinction between the written language, identical in all Arabic-speaking areas and regulated by grammarians, and the spoken language, which differed from region to region. This differentiation was taken up by the Jews, who wrote poetry only in biblical Hebrew and regulated the poetical idiom by compiling detailed grammars. Syntax found no place in these grammars, however, because Arabic syntax was based on the cases of nouns and the moods of verbs, and biblical Hebrew had neither.
Nor could biblical Hebrew be used for scientific writing in the way that written Arabic could, since its vocabulary was too limited. The alternative---to use Mishnaic Hebrew---was not acceptable, because this "language of our forefathers" was assumed to have been a spoken tongue which, by Arab standards, could therefore not be written or used for serious purposes. It was thus customary among Spanish Jews to write scientific prose in Arabic only.
This situation changed completely after 1148, when many Jews in Muslim Spain escaped persecution by moving to southern France, where they encountered a positive attitude to Mishnaic Hebrew and so produced writings in it. Not only were works written in Arabic now translated into Hebrew but original works were also written in Hebrew which, like the translations, devised new technical terms on the basis of Arabic models. Some features of Arabic syntax were likewise adopted, thus laying the ideological foundation for an enlargement of the Hebrew vocabulary. The ensuing flow of translations and original scientific writings made Hebrew the outstanding scientific language of the later Middle Ages.
Hebrew was thus never a dead language. Apart from writing letters, there is evidence that Jewish men could speak Hebrew to Jews with whom they had no other language in common. The kabbalists also endowed the Hebrew language and Alphabet with mystical significance. In the latter half of the 18th century, adherents of Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) began to publish Hebrew articles on social and cultural problems which involved new modes of argumentation and new terms. Modern Hebrew is associated with Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who in the late 19th century stressed the connection between language and nationalism, on the one hand, and on the other, the importance of speaking Hebrew at home and in all situations, to the exclusion of those Jewish or other languages which the immigrants to Erets Israel had brought with them.
Modern Hebrew was not, as is often stated, an ad hoc fusion of biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew. This fusion had already taken place in the Middle Ages and gave rise both to learned writing and popular literature on religious topics. After an era of pure biblical Hebrew in the late 18th and 19th centuries, modern Hebrew was reinstated and artistically developed from 1886 by the writer Mendele Mokher Seforim (Shalom Ya'akov Abramovitch). Its use was further promoted by the establishment of Hebrew schools in Erets Israel during the 1880s, which were soon followed by others in Eastern Europe. As the everyday language in Erets Israel, Hebrew facilitated communication among immigrants speaking many different languages and gave birth to a modern literature. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, it was declared the national language; at that time, too, the Sephardi pronunciation of Hebrew became normative.
In ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi circles, modern Hebrew was for a long time not accepted as a language of communication except with outsiders. Yiddish was the everyday language and the traditional Ashkenazi pronunciation remained obligatory for prayer and religious study in these circles. Lately, however, ever-increasing numbers of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel have begun speaking and conducting their business in Hebrew. The modern Conservative and Reform movements both introduced the vernacular into their prayer services and some Reform congregations virtually abandoned Hebrew altogether. However, in recent decades, this trend has been reversed and Hebrew can now be heard, to a lesser or greater extent, in every type of Jewish service.
