Biblical Hebrew

Biblical Hebrew (עִבְרִית מִקְרָאִית‎ Ivrit Miqra'it or לְשׁוֹן הַמִּקְרָא‎ 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 'Hebrew' was not used for the language in the Bible, which was referred to as שפת כנען (sefat kena'an, i.e. language of Canaan) or יהודית (Yehudit, i.e. Judaean), but the name was used in Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts. Hebrew is attested epigraphically from about the 10th century BCE, and spoken Hebrew persisted through and beyond the Second Temple period, which ended in the siege of Jerusalem (CE 70).It eventually developed into Mishnaic Hebrew, spoken up until the fifth century CE. 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. There is also some evidence of regional dialectal variation, including differences between Biblical Hebrew as spoken in the northern Kingdom of Israel and in the southern Kingdom of Judah. The consonantal text was transmitted in manuscript form, and underwent redaction in the Second Temple period, but its earliest portions (parts of Amos, Isaiah, Hosea and Micah) can be dated to the late 8th to early 7th centuries BCE. Biblical Hebrew has been written with a number of different writing systems. The Hebrews adopted the Phoenician alphabet around the 12th century BCE, which developed into the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. This was retained by the Samaritans, who use the descendent Samaritan alphabet to this day. However, the Aramaic alphabet gradually displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet for the Jews, and it became the source for the modern Hebrew alphabet. All of these scripts were lacking letters to represent all of the sounds of Biblical Hebrew, though these sounds are reflected in Greek and Latin transcriptions/translations of the time. These scripts originally only indicated 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 in wide use. Biblical Hebrew possessed a series of 'emphatic' consonants whose precise articulation is disputed, likely ejective or pharyngealized. Earlier Biblical Hebrew possessed three consonants which did not have their own letters in the writing system, but over time they 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 in the modern Samaritan Hebrew reading tradition. The vowel system of Biblical Hebrew changed over time and is reflected differently in the ancient Greek and Latin transcriptions, medieval vocalization systems, and modern reading traditions. Biblical Hebrew had a typical Semitic morphology with nonconcatenative morphology, arranging Semitic roots into patterns to form words. Biblical Hebrew distinguished two genders (masculine, feminine), three numbers (singular, plural, and uncommonly, dual). Verbs were marked for voice and mood, and had two conjugations which may have indicated aspect and/or tense (a matter of debate). The tense or aspect of verbs was also influenced by the conjugation ו‎, in the so-called waw-consecutive construction. Default word order was verb–subject–object, and verbs 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. The earliest written sources refer to Biblical Hebrew by the name of the land in which it was spoken: שפת כנען‎ 'the language of Canaan' (see Isaiah 19:18). The Hebrew Bible also shows that the language was called יהודית‎ 'Judaean, Judahite' (see, for example, 2 Kings 18:26,28). In the Hellenistic period Greek writings use the names Hebraios, Hebraïsti (Josephus, Antiquities I, 1:2, etc.), and in Mishnaic Hebrew we find עברית‎ 'Hebrew' and לשון עברית‎ 'Hebrew language' (Mishnah Gittin 9:8, etc.). The origin of this term is obscure; suggested origins include the biblical Eber, the ethnonyms Ḫabiru, Ḫapiru, and ˁApiru found in sources from Egypt and the near east, 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 include all pre-medieval dialects of Hebrew, including Mishnaic Hebrew, or it may be limited to Hebrew contemporaneous with the Hebrew Bible. The term Biblical Hebrew refers to pre-Mishnaic dialects (sometimes excluding Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew). The term 'Biblical Hebrew' may or may not include extra-biblical texts, such as inscriptions (e.g. the Siloam inscription), and generally also includes later vocalization traditions for the Hebrew Bible's consonantal text, most commonly the early medieval Tiberian vocalization.