Biblical Hebrew: The Language of the Hebrew Bible

Biblical Hebrew is the specific ancient register of Hebrew in which the great majority of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, was composed across roughly a millennium from the twelfth to the second centuries BCE, belonging to the Northwest Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family alongside Aramaic and Phoenician, with which it shares close grammatical and lexical kinship reflecting the Canaanite linguistic environment from which biblical Hebrew emerged.

Biblical Hebrew itself shows internal historical development across the Bible's own composition period, distinguishable through vocabulary, grammar and even specific spelling conventions that allow scholars to date different biblical texts relative to one another with reasonable confidence, and the language ceased to function as a widely spoken vernacular sometime after the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE, when Aramaic became the everyday spoken language of most Jews even as Hebrew retained its unique scriptural and liturgical prestige. Modern Hebrew, revived as a spoken vernacular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries chiefly through the efforts of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, draws its grammar and core vocabulary substantially from Biblical Hebrew even though the two differ meaningfully in everyday usage.