Biblical Hebrew
Biblical Hebrew, 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 שְֹפַת כְּנַעַן or יְהוּדִית , 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, was transmitted in manuscript form and underwent redaction and modernization in the Second Temple period, but its earliest portions 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 employed 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 matres lectionis, 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 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 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, and three numbers. 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 ו, the "waw-consecutive" construction. The default word order for Biblical Hebrew was verb–subject–object, 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 שפת כנען 'the language of Canaan'. The Hebrew Bible also calls the language יהודית 'Judaean, Judahite' In the Hellenistic period, Greek writings use the names Hebraios, Hebraïsti and in Mishnaic Hebrew we find עברית 'Hebrew' and לשון עברית 'Hebrew language'. 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 עבר 'to pass', alluding to crossing over the Jordan River. Jews also began referring to Hebrew as לשון הקדש '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 ; 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 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, 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.".
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. 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 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. 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
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. There is no evidence that these mergers occurred after the adaptation of the Hebrew alphabet.
As a Northwest Semitic language, Hebrew shows the shift of initial to, a similar independent pronoun system to the other Northwest Semitic languages, some archaic forms, such as 'we', first person singular pronominal suffix -i or -ya, and commonly preceding pronominal suffixes. Case endings are found in Northwest Semitic languages in the second millennium BCE, but disappear almost totally afterwards. Mimation is absent in singular nouns, but is often retained in the plural, as in Hebrew.
The Northwest Semitic languages formed a dialect continuum in the Iron Age, with Phoenician and Aramaic on each extreme. Hebrew is classed with Phoenician in the Canaanite subgroup, which also includes Ammonite, Edomite, and Moabite. Moabite might be considered a Hebrew dialect, though it possessed distinctive Aramaic features. Although Ugaritic shows a large degree of affinity to Hebrew in poetic structure, vocabulary, and some grammar, it lacks some Canaanite features, and its similarities are more likely a result of either contact or preserved archaism.
Hebrew underwent the Canaanite shift, where Proto-Semitic tended to shift to, perhaps when stressed. Hebrew also shares with the Canaanite languages the shifts >, and >, widespread reduction of diphthongs, and full assimilation of non-final to the following consonant if word final, i.e. בַּת from *bant. There is also evidence of a rule of assimilation of to the following coronal consonant in pre-tonic position, shared by Hebrew, Phoenician and Aramaic: cf בַּיִת báyiṯ, but plural בָּתִּים battím.
Typical Canaanite words in Hebrew include: גַּג "roof" שֻׁלְחָן "table" חַלֹּון "window" יָשָׁן "old " זָקֵן "old " and גֵּרֵשׁ "expel". Morphological Canaanite features in Hebrew include the masculine plural marker -ם, first person singular pronoun אָנֹכִי, interrogative pronoun מִי, definite article הַ-, and third person plural feminine verbal marker -ת.