When was hebrew spoken

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The process of the Hebrew language revival began on October 13th , as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his friends agreed to exclusively speak Hebrew in their conversations. As a result, the language, which had not been spoken as a mother tongue since the second century CE, once again became the national language of Israel. Subscribe for our daily newsletter. Hot Opinion. Most Read. Reporters' Tweets. About Us. Contact us. Advertise with Us.

Terms Of Service. Privacy Policy. Subscriber Agreement. JPost Jobs. Late Biblical Hebrew refers to the language of the books of the Bible written after the exile.

This is without doubt one of the most serious limitations for an adequate study of its history. The approximately 8, lexical items preserved in the books of the Bible would not have been enough to meet the needs of a living language.

Whatever the truth of the matter, we have to recognize that the exact beginnings of the Hebrew language are still surrounded by mystery.

From the moment of its appearance in a documented written form, Hebrew offers clear evidence that it belongs to the Canaanite group of languages, with certain peculiarities of its own. Possibly this means that when the Israelite tribes settled in Canaan they adopted the language of that country, at least for their written documents. In the passage where Jacob and his descendants are portrayed as making a final break from Laban the Aramaean, Genesis , various writers have seen an allusion to the time when the Israelites abandoned Aramaic and adopted the Canaanite language of the country they were living in.

Combining historical and linguistic issues, it was suggested in the first decades of this century that Hebrew is not a homogeneous linguistic system but a Mischsprache [hybrid language], in which it is possible to distinguish an early Canaanite layer, very close to Akkadian, and another more recent layer, closer to Aramaic and Southern Semitic…. As well as modified versions of the Mischsprache hypothesis which continued to receive a measure of support until recently, there have also been claims by various scholars, often led by considerations of an allegedly historical nature, that clear traces of Aramaic can be found in the origins of Hebrew.

However, the various rebuttals of the Mischsprache theory have ensured that it is no longer generally regarded as very plausible nowadays, and a different kind of approach to the problems which fuelled the theory is favored. Various recent studies have emphasized that Aramaic might have influenced Hebrew very strongly, not when Hebrew first emerged but many centuries later, in the second half of the first millennium B.