Biblical Hebrew

Biblical Hebrew ( Ivrit Miqra'it or Leshon ha-Miqra), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of Hebrew, a Canaanite Semitic language spoken by the Israelites in the area known as Israel, roughly west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea.

The Torah (the first five books), and most of the rest of the Hebrew Bible, is written in Biblical Hebrew, with much of its present form specifically in the dialect that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BCE, around the time of the Babylonian captivity.

The term "Hebrew" was not used for the language in the Bible, which was referred to as (sefat kena'an, i.e. language of Canaan) or (Yehudit, i.e. Judaean), but the name was used in Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts.

The forms of the Hebrew in the Talmud can be divided into Classical Hebrew for direct quotations from the Hebrew Bible, and Mishnaic Hebrew can be further sub-divided into Mishnaic Hebrew proper (also called Tannaitic Hebrew, Early Rabbinic Hebrew, or Mishnaic Hebrew I), which was a spoken language, and Amoraic Hebrew (also called Late Rabbinic Hebrew or Mishnaic Hebrew II), which was a literary language only.

Biblical Hebrew ( Ivrit Miqra'it or Leshon ha-Miqra), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of Hebrew, a Canaanite Semitic language spoken by the Israelites in the area known as Israel, roughly west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea.

The term Israelite is the English name for the descendants of the biblical patriarch Jacob in ancient times, which is derived from the Greek Ισραηλίτες, which was used to translate the Biblical Hebrew term b'nei yisrael, יִשְׂרָאֵל as either "sons of Israel" or "children of Israel".

This was retained by the Samaritans, who use the descendent Samaritan alphabet to this day.

Biblical Hebrew Šomerim "Guardians" (singular Šomer) comes from the Hebrew Semitic root שמר, which means "to watch, guard".

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.

It has been used by scholars of the Hebrew Bible to clarify Biblical Hebrew texts and has revealed ways in which the cultures of ancient Israel and Judah found parallels in the neighboring cultures.

Biblical Hebrew ( Ivrit Miqra'it or Leshon ha-Miqra), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of Hebrew, a Canaanite Semitic language spoken by the Israelites in the area known as Israel, roughly west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea.

Millions learn these as a second language (or an archaic version of their modern tongues): many Muslims learn to read and recite the Qur'an and Jews speak and study Biblical Hebrew, the language of the Torah, Midrash, and other Jewish scriptures.

The Northwest Semitic languages formed a dialect continuum in the Iron Age (1200–540 BCE), with Phoenician and Aramaic on each extreme.

Phoenician was a language originally spoken in the coastal (Mediterranean) region then called "Canaan" (in Phoenician, Hebrew, Old Arabic, and Aramaic), "Phoenicia" (in Greek and Latin), and "Pūt" (in the Egyptian language).

Verbs were marked for voice and mood, and had two conjugations which may have indicated aspect and/or tense (a matter of debate).

Some languages (such as Albanian, Bengali, Fula, Tamil, Sanskrit, Icelandic, Swedish, Biblical Hebrew and Ancient Greek) have a middle voice, which is a set of inflections or constructions which is to some extent different from both the active and passive voices.

Biblical Hebrew after the Second Temple period evolved into Mishnaic Hebrew, which ceased being spoken and developed into a literary language around 200 CE. Hebrew continued to be used as a literary and liturgical language in the form of Medieval Hebrew, and Hebrew began a revival process in the 19th century, culminating in Modern Hebrew becoming the official language of Israel.

The term "Modern Hebrew" has been described as "somewhat problematic" as it implies unambiguous periodization from Biblical Hebrew.

Default word order was verb–subject–object, and verbs inflected for the number, gender, and person of their subject.

the Afroasiatic languages (including Berber, Assyrian, Egyptian, Arabic, Biblical Hebrew and Ge'ez)

Biblical Hebrew as recorded in the Hebrew Bible reflects various stages of the Hebrew language in its consonantal skeleton, as well as a vocalic system which was added in the Middle Ages by the Masoretes.

These texts are composed mainly in Biblical Hebrew, with some passages in Biblical Aramaic (in the books of Daniel, Ezra and a few others).

Hebrew is classed with Phoenician in the Canaanite subgroup, which also includes Ammonite, Edomite, and Moabite.

Edomite was a Canaanite language, very similar to Hebrew, spoken by the Edomites in southwestern Jordan and parts of Israel in the 1st millennium BC. It is known only from a very small corpus.

Hebrew as spoken in the northern Kingdom of Israel, known also as Israelian Hebrew, shows phonological, lexical, and grammatical differences from southern dialects.

Israelian Hebrew (or IH) is a proposed northern dialect of biblical Hebrew (BH).

However, the Aramaic alphabet gradually displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet for the Jews, and it became the source for the modern Hebrew alphabet.

Biblical

According to the Gemara, Hebrew of this period was similar to Imperial Aramaic; in Pesahim, Tractate 87b, Hanina bar Hama said that God sent the exiled Jews to Babylon because "[the Babylonian] language is akin to the Leshon Hakodesh".

Old Aramaic and Biblical Hebrew both form part of the group of Northwest Semitic languages, and during antiquity, there may still have been substantial mutual intelligibility.

These scripts originally only indicated consonants, but certain letters, known by the Latin term matres lectionis, became increasingly used to mark vowels.

! Biblical

According to the Gemara, Hebrew of this period was similar to Imperial Aramaic; in Pesahim, Tractate 87b, Hanina bar Hama said that God sent the exiled Jews to Babylon because "[the Babylonian] language is akin to the Leshon Hakodesh".

In its narrow sense, Lashon Hakodesh refers not to the Hebrew language in its entirety, but rather to the Biblical Hebrew only.

In Biblical Hebrew, ' means "sword", and the verb ' means "to arm".

Some Qumran texts written in the Assyrian script write the tetragrammaton and some other divine names in Paleo-Hebrew, and this practice is also found in several Jewish-Greek biblical translations.

The letters, properly read from right to left (in Biblical Hebrew), are:

In particular, there is evidence from the rendering of proper nouns in the Koine Greek Septuagint (3rd–2nd centuries BCE ) and the Greek alphabet transcription of the Hebrew biblical text contained in the Secunda (3rd century CE, likely a copy of a preexisting text from before 100 BCE ).

The Septuagint (from the septuāgintā literally "seventy", often abbreviated as LXX and sometimes called the Greek Old Testament) is the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures from the original Hebrew.

While the Tiberian, Babylonian, and Palestinian reading traditions are extinct, various other systems of pronunciation have evolved over time, notably the Yemenite, Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Samaritan traditions.

Sephardi Hebrew (or Sepharadi Hebrew) is the pronunciation system for Biblical Hebrew favored for liturgical use by Sephardi Jewish practice.

While the Tiberian, Babylonian, and Palestinian reading traditions are extinct, various other systems of pronunciation have evolved over time, notably the Yemenite, Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Samaritan traditions.

Ashkenazi Hebrew ( Hagiyya Ashkenazit, אַשכּנזישע הבֿרה Ashkenazishe Havara), is the pronunciation system for Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew favored for liturgical use and study by Ashkenazi Jewish practice.

While the Tiberian, Babylonian, and Palestinian reading traditions are extinct, various other systems of pronunciation have evolved over time, notably the Yemenite, Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Samaritan traditions. In addition, the Samaritan reading tradition is independent of these systems, and was occasionally notated with a separate vocalization system.

Samaritan Hebrew is a reading tradition used liturgically by the Samaritans for reading the Ancient Hebrew language of the Samaritan Pentateuch, in contrast to Biblical Hebrew (the language of the Masoretic Jewish Pentateuch).

Biblical Hebrew ( Ivrit Miqra'it or Leshon ha-Miqra), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of Hebrew, a Canaanite Semitic language spoken by the Israelites in the area known as Israel, roughly west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea.

The oldest inscriptions in Paleo-Hebrew script are dated to around the middle of the 9th century BCE, the most famous being the Mesha Stele in the Moabite language (which might be considered a dialect of Hebrew).

The main features distinguishing Moabite from fellow Canaanite languages such as Hebrew are: a plural in -în rather than -îm (e.g. mlkn "kings" for Biblical Hebrew məlākîm), like Aramaic and Arabic; retention of the feminine ending -at or "-ah", which Biblical Hebrew reduces to -āh only (e.g. qiryat or qiryah, "town", Biblical Hebrew qiryāh) but retains in the construct state nominal form (e.g. qiryát yisrael "town of Israel"); and retention of a verb form with infixed -t-, also found in Arabic and Akkadian (w-’ltḥm "I began to fight", from the root lḥm).