Biblical Hebrew Blog by ClassicalHebrew.com

Like many middle-eastern languages, Hebrew is a member of the family known as the Semitic languages. This name follows the biblical description of the post-deluvian divide between the sons of Noa – Shem, Ham and Japheth, who divided according to their nations and languages. The acknowledgement of this fact and the investigation of the languages surrounding biblical Hebrew can assist us in better understanding the language we strive to learn.

Like any family, a family of languages is defined when we have the ability to define a common source from which all the members of the family evolved, and a set of rules that can explain the different stages of evolution and the outcomes of these processes in the different languages. In the case of Hebrew, the joint ancestor is a conjectured language, of which we have no actual proof, labeled as “proto-Semitic.” This archetypal language developed over many centuries, branched off into many smaller branches, and eventually became many different languages, all similar in some respects but also very different in others, as distant relatives often are. An example of the close kinship between all these different languages can be found in joint vocabulary such as the consonants mlk, which denote the word “king” in many of the members of the Semitic family of languages.

Hebrew is defined as part of the more specific family of North-Western Semitic languages, a branch including Arabic, Aramaic, Canaanite languages and Ugaritic. Most similar to Hebrew are of course her fellow Canaanite languages (or possibly even dialects) such as Ammonite and Moabite. These languages have close vocabulary, grammatical and morphological ties. For example, in all these languages, a long ā sound found in other Semitic languages becomes a long ō sound, a clear-cut characteristic that enables us to identify whether or not a language is Canaanite.

Despite the fact that it is not a Canaanite language, Ugaritic is extremely close to Biblical Hebrew. Seeing that the Ugaritic culture is closely tied with the Canaanite, this is a good example of the fact that culture and language often go together and that the influences of one are often discovered when researching the other.

Once becoming a language of its own, Hebrew also underwent many changes and influences, from early Biblical Hebrew – the earliest recorded form – to Second Temple Hebrew, influenced immensely by Aramaic, the Hebrew of the Rabbis, and finally, Modern Hebrew.

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