History of the
Hebrew Language

The Hebrew language is part of a language group known as the Semitic Languages. These are named after Noah's son Shem. These include a western group of languages including Hebrew, Aramaic, Moabite, Ammonite, Phoenician, and Ugaritic. They also include an Eastern group including Assyrian and Babylonian. These languages share common characteristics such as a three letter root for nouns and verbs, similar vocabulary, and the use of pronominal suffixes for nouns, verbs, and prepositions. The Hebrew forms found in Scripture cover a range of 1400 - 400 BC and went through several changes both during and after this time period.

The ancient or early Hebrew language used an angular script and was in regular use until around 586 BC, the time of the exile. Examples can be seen in the Siloam inscription, Mesha Stone, and Lachish letters. It was still in limited use as late as 50 AD for Elohim's name in the Dead Sea Scrolls. At this time, Hebrew was a consonantal text which means that it contained no written vowels.

Aramaic is another old language known even in the book of Genesis where Aramaic words are found in the account with Laban. It did not become a major language until around 900 BC when it became the international language of diplomacy. It was strong through the Assyrian, Persian, and somewhat into the Babylonian empires. Only after the arrival of the Greek empire in 300 BC did it decline. It was around the Babylonian exile in 586 BC that the Jewish people adopted the Aramaic square script which is used in the Masoretic Text and which is familiar today.

One of the four major periods of Hebrew language development occurred around 200 AD. This was the Mishnaic, or Rabbinic, Hebrew used in the writing of the Mishna, the first portion of the Talmud. This language was never really used as a spoken language.

In the early centuries AD, the Jewish people had been scattered and the knowledge of how to pronounce and read the Hebrew was being forgotten. A group of Jewish scholars, known as Masoretes, had kept meticulous records of the consonantal text. Yet they developed a vowel points that went above and below the letters to record the traditional reading of the text. This was done somewhere in the 600 - 900 AD time range.

In more recent centuries, multiple dialects of the Hebrew language have appeared. Among the most common are the Ashkenazic, or German, and the Sephardic, or Spanish, pronunciations. There is also the Yiddish language which is written in Hebrew but is made up of mostly German words.