Biblical Hebrew

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.

Biblical Hebrew's original text was written without vowel markings, since ancient Hebrew script, like other Semitic abjads, recorded consonants only, leaving pronunciation to be preserved through oral tradition until the Masoretes, Jewish scholars working primarily in Tiberias between roughly the seventh and tenth centuries CE, developed a comprehensive system of vowel points and cantillation marks specifically to fix correct pronunciation and liturgical chanting of the biblical text with precision, producing the Masoretic Text that remains the authoritative Hebrew Bible text for Judaism today.

Biblical Hebrew remains the required language of Torah scroll writing for synagogue use, copied by hand according to strict scribal rules by trained scribes called soferim, and Hebrew liturgical readings from the Torah and other biblical books remain central to synagogue worship, with the specific cantillation melodies, trope, associated with the Masoretic markings varying somewhat by community while all deriving from the same underlying Masoretic textual tradition established over a millennium ago.

The Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex, the two most important surviving Masoretic manuscripts, dated to the tenth and early eleventh centuries CE respectively, remain the primary textual basis for virtually all modern printed and critical editions of the Hebrew Bible used by scholars and religious communities alike.