HEBREW LANGUAGE

One of the Semitic languages, more precisely a Canaanite dialect among the dialects of Northwest Semitic. The Northwest Semitic branch of the Semitic languages extends over Palestine, Phoenicia, and Syria. In Isaiah 19.18, Hebrew is called "the language [literally, lip] of Canaan," while in Isaiah 36.11 and Nehemiah 13.24 it is referred to as "the language of Judah." Monuments in this language range from the 10th century b.c. (Gezer Calendar) down to the present. This article is limited to a description of Biblical Hebrew.

With the exception of the small sections in Ezra4.8–6.18; 7.12–26; Jeremiah 10.11; Daniel 2.4b–7.28 that are written in the aramaic language, the protocanonical books of the Old Testament are written in Hebrew. Among the deuterocanonical books, Baruch, Judith, Tobit, 1 Maccabees, and the deuterocanonical parts of Daniel and Esther, written originally in Hebrew or Aramaic, are extant only in Greek versions, apart from the Qumran fragments. Sirach, though composed in Hebrew, was known only in a Greek version until 1896, when about two-thirds of the chapters in Hebrew were discovered.

Script. Hebrew was written in the common Canaanite alphabet that was used alike by the Israelites, the Moabites, the Phoenicians (from whom the Greeks borrowed it c. 800 b.c.), and the Aramaeans. The earliest Hebrew examples of writing are in the Phoenician script, but in the postexilic period a transition was made to the Aramaic "square script," which is that generally found at Qumran and in modern printed Hebrew Bibles. The discovery of thousands of fragments of scrolls at Qumran and in the region of the Dead Sea (see dead sea scrolls) has permitted Hebrew paleography to reach such a point of precision as to make possible the dating of a style of writing to within a generation. Like Arabic, Hebrew is written from right to left.

The alphabet numbers 22 consonants, and as this is less than the 28 of Arabic and Ugaritic, some of the characters, such as ḥet and ‘ayin, represent both the harsher and the softer sounds. In certain periods the six consonants b g d k p t were aspirated or not according to position (thus b and bh, g and gh ), so that the number of sounds in the alphabet was augmented. At first the writing was purely consonantal, but later the consonants he, waw, and yod were adopted to indicate respectively the pure long vowels â, û and ô, and î and ê. These vowel letters are technically known as matres lectionis. With the gradual cessation of Hebrew as a living language—the Qumran discoveries show that it was still well understood at the turn of the Christian era—the need was felt to safeguard the pronunciation of the consonantal text, authoritatively fixed toward the end of the 1st Christian century. Thus a vowel system was devised by the Masoretes in about the 5th century and elaborated by them over the following centuries. Two main systems were invented: the Babylonian with mainly superlinear signs, and the Palestinian, or Tiberian, in which the signs were placed mainly under the lines. The Tiberian system is that found in modern Hebrew Bibles generally. The system attained such a degree of precision as to show all the vowel changes occasioned by lengthening, by tone, by laryngals, etc. The rigid uniformity achieved by the Masoretes had the unfortunate side effect of effacing dialectal variations, necessarily existing in the Biblical books that were composed in different places and over a millennium (c. 1200–c. 200 b.c.); but with the aid of the Ugaritic texts (c. 1400–c. 1200 b.c.; see ugarit) and the Qumran scrolls, scholars are slowly recovering the dialectal elements that are still identifiable in the Masoretic text.

Morphology and Vocabulary. Hebrew shares the characteristics of the Semitic family of languages, which may be briefly summarized as follows. The roots or basic forms from which the words are derived are usually composed of three consonants, though biliteral roots are very early and important. Vowels do not form parts of the roots but merely serve to express various modifications of the root sense; thus, mālak (he ruled), but melek (king). The reader conversant with Hebrew does not need written vowels, as these can be supplied mentally from the context. The simple form of the verb is modified by added letters, lengthened vowels, and reduplicated radicals to express intensive, causative, reciprocal, or reflexive action. Prefixes and affixes derived from the independent personal pronouns indicate the person, gender, and number of the verb. The function of the Hebrew verb is still a matter of dispute. One view maintains that the perfect form expresses past time and the imperfect form present and future time. A more widely held opinion considers the verb forms as expressing modes of action; the perfect is the mode of completed action, while the imperfect refers to uncompleted action. Neither view can adequately account for all the data, so a less rigid classification seems called for. What has been considered the imperfect form may more fittingly be described as a universal tense because of its possible past, present, or future reference. On the other hand, the perfect form, hitherto regarded as expressing past or completed action, may equally denote present or future action; the context must be the determining factor.

The vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew is relatively small, only about a tenth of its 5,500 words being found with any frequency. It has been estimated that the known vocabulary cannot represent over a fifth of the total stock of Northwest Semitic words used between 1400 and 400 b.c. The sudden afflux, however, of some 1,800 new words from the Ugaritic tablets has made it possible to identify a good number of obscure words in the Bible, so that the Biblical vocabulary is now judged richer than traditionally assumed.

Modern Study of Hebrew. The modern scientific study of Biblical Hebrew, which began with H. F. Wilhelm Gesenius (d. 1842), has received a fresh impetus from the discovery of the Ugaritic tablets (1929–), which record an ancient Canaanite dialect closely akin to Hebrew. The preservation in this dialect of the three case endings known from Akkadian and Arabic, the four verbal modes, the rich variety of particles, such as vocative lamed, emphatic lamed, and enclitic mem, and the varied prepositions used with multifarious nuances bespeaks a language capable of expressing highly nuanced sentiments. Alerted by these characteristics of Ugaritic, Hebraists have been finding similar phenomena in the Bible that had been concealed by the Masoretic leveling. The gradual reassessment of Hebrew points to the conclusion that the language of the poetical books in particular was much more complex and nuanced than earlier opinion allowed.

See Also: hebrew studies (in the christian church)

Bibliography: a. schall, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, ed. j. hofer and k. rahner, 10 v. (2d, new ed. Freiburg) 5:49–51. Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible, tr. and adap. by l. hartman (New York 1963), from a. van den born, Bijbels Woordenboek 951–55. w. gesenius, Hebräische Grammatik (Halle 1810, 28th ed. rev. e. kautzsch 1909; 29th ed. rev. g. bergstrÄsser 1929; Eng. tr. a. e. cowley, Oxford 1910). h. bauer and p. leander, Historische Grammatik der hebräischen Sprache des. A.T. (Hildesheim 1918–22; repr. 1962). p. joÜon, Grammaire de l'hébreu biblique (2d ed. Rome 1947). j. weingreen, A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew (Oxford 1939; repr. 1955). g. beer and r. meyer, Hebräische Grammatik, 2 v. (Berlin 1952–55), the first to use, though to a limited degree, the data made available by the Ugaritic discoveries. c. brockelmann, Hebräische Syntax (Neukirchen 1956). w. gesenius, Hebräisches und aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, ed. f. buhl (17th ed. Leipzig 1921; repr. 1949). f. brown et al., A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, ed. w. gesenius (Oxford 1906; repr.1951). l. koehler and w. baumgarntner, Lexicon in Veteris Testamenti libros (2d ed. Leiden 1958). f. zorell, Lexicon Hebraicum et Aramaicum Veteris Testamenti (Rome 1946–), Latin.

[m. j. dahood]