Hebrew

What is Hebrew?

Hebrew is attested since approximately the 10th century BCE (Shanks 2010, via JLP) — the only living Canaanite language. Biblical Hebrew (Early/archaic, then classical 8th–6th c. BCE, VSO word order, /w/ for vav, pharyngeals and emphatics preserved) ceased to be broadly spoken around the 587 BCE exile but continued in writing into the Hellenistic period. Rabbinic Hebrew carried the Mishnah and the Bar Kokhba letters; Tannaitic Hebrew was spoken until ~200 CE, and Hebrew faded as an everyday vernacular between 200 and 400 CE after the Bar Kokhba revolt. Medieval Hebrew lived as a liturgical and literary lingua franca: piyyutim from the 6th–7th centuries, the Masoretic codification at Tiberias, and the 10th-century literary revival in al-Andalus (Dunash ben Labrat, Ibn Gabirol, Judah ha-Levi) through Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. Modern Hebrew grew from Haskalah experimentation (the Ha-Me’asef periodical, Königsberg 1783–1811) into the revival associated with Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (in Jerusalem from 1881) — fought over in a real "language quarrel" (riv ha-leshonot) with Yiddishists — and became a national language in 1948. It was still an occasional spoken lingua franca among Middle Eastern and North African Jews before Ben-Yehuda, countering the myth it was only literary (Tirosh-Becker 2015, via JLP). JLP’s paired estimate — ~50 conversational speakers in 1900 vs ~9 million in 2024 — is the sharpest documented language-revival arc in this dataset (Benor 2024). Zuckermann’s contested "Israelit"/hybrid thesis (2006) — that Modern Hebrew is a Semitic–Indo-European fusion — is endorsed by some and rejected by others as politically motivated (Philologos 2004; Williams 2007, all via JLP). Hebrew is the reference language of this constellation: the other eleven languages must never be presented as its dialects — each has an independent family lineage and grammar.