How Hebrew Became a Holy Language

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From time immemorial Hebrew has been regarded as a holy language by Jews and Christians and is still so regarded by many. But is it? Does Hebrew differ from other languages, not just in the purpose to which it has been set—but intrinsically, in its inner workings? Semitics scholars will mostly deny this: Hebrew is a normal human language. A Biblical scholar might add: A human language that rather by accident came to serve as a vessel for revelation.

I would argue that although Hebrew did not start out as a holy tongue, over time it really did become one.

Hebrew lies in the cradle of the western university. Its prestige derives from its importance to two world religions, Judaism and Christianity. From the beginning, the academic study of Hebrew had no other justification than the wish to scrutinize the Scriptures in their original language.

Traditional exegesis—both Jewish and Christian—regarded Hebrew as God’s language. Hebrew was the language of creation as described in the Bible, the language of all humanity before the confusion occasioned at the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–8). Rabbinic midrash found proof of this within the Bible itself. According to Genesis 2:22–23, the “Woman” was created from the “Man.” “She shall be called Wo-Man because she was taken out of Man.” In Hebrew it creates a marvelous play on words: What the Lord God took from the Man (ish) was fashioned into the Woman (isha) (Genesis 2:23). This play on words works well in Hebrew but not in most other 045languages (although it doesn’t work badly in English). Consider, for example, Latin mulier (woman) which has nothing in common with vir (man).

The conclusion is obvious: God must have been speaking Hebrew. And Adam and Eve must have been speaking Hebrew when they were speaking with God.

In different variations, the idea that Hebrew was the primordial language, mysteriously surviving among the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, was adopted by most Jewish and Christian authorities from Antiquity through the Middle Ages. It was embraced by such heavyweights as Origen, Jerome, John Chrysostom and Augustine. Even in the modern period, most scholars continued, until the middle of the 18th century or so, to accept the idea that Hebrew had been the original language of all humankind.

If Hebrew is of divine origin, one would expect it to be completely different from other languages—more expressive, more precise, more truthful. Confirmation that it did in fact differ from other languages was found again in the creation account. When God created the animals, he brought them to Adam “to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was 046the name thereof” (Genesis 2:19). Surely God knew the names of the animals before Adam pronounced them. It follows, then, that Adam did not name the animals arbitrarily—but gave them the names they really had in God’s language, that is, Hebrew.

Today, of course, views of the Hebrew language have changed. Hebrew is again, and has been for almost 70 years, a national language. In the State of Israel, Hebrew is used not only to study the Bible, but also to buy ice cream, to discuss football and to talk politics. The phenomenon of Modern Hebrew relativizes the notion that Hebrew is a sacred language.

But long before the creation of the State of Israel, long before the resurrection of Hebrew as a spoken language, the notion that Hebrew was a holy tongue had come to be discredited among specialists. In the 18th century, advanced research on comparative Semitics had shown not only that Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic were closely related—something that had been known full well since the ninth century at least—but also that Arabic retains many features that are more archaic than their equivalents in Hebrew.

Wilhelm Gesenius, at the beginning of the 19th century, showed in detail how the Hebrew language changed over the Biblical period, manifesting more archaic traits in earlier texts and more modern elements in later texts.^a Hebrew is not a divine language, eternal and immutable; it is a human idiom, obeying the general laws of linguistics and adapting to socio-cultural and political influences through time.

Nevertheless, I maintain that Hebrew may reasonably be considered a holy tongue. Although originally an ordinary human language, over time it became a sacred idiom, fit for religious purposes and ever so slightly unfit for everything else.

As the Bible itself remembers (Deuteronomy 26:5), Hebrew was not the language of the Founding Families. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were Aramaeans from Mesopotamia or farther afield.

The “language of Canaan,” where they journeyed, was a local Northwest Semitic dialect spoken in the land long before there is any mention of a “people of Israel.”

Classical Hebrew as attested in the older books of the Bible is very similar to Moabite, a Trans-Jordanian language, and close too to Phoenician, a language attested along the Mediterranean coast. If the Israelites, or some of them, came to Canaan from elsewhere—a notion for which there is little hard evidence but which is affirmed throughout the Hebrew Bible—they must have adopted the language from the local population after their arrival.

When populations migrate, the newcomers, after one or two generations, commonly adopt the local language.

The presence of a group called “Israel” in Canaan at the end of the 13th century B.C.E. is confirmed by the Merneptah Stele, a lengthy hieroglyphic text in which Pharaoh Merneptah claims to have destroyed “(the people of) Israel” as well as specific Canaanite cities.^b Israel also shows up in the material archaeol047ogical record.

From a loose association of villages and regions, Israel turned into a more centralized entity; by the end of the tenth century B.C.E., two kingdoms—Israel and Judah—emerge. Ancient Hebrew is spoken throughout the territory of both, although in different dialects.

In 722 B.C.E. the Assyrian empire devastated the northern Kingdom of Israel and incorporated its territory into the Assyrian empire.

A century and a third later, the Babylonian empire, having displaced the Assyrians on the international stage, invaded the southern Kingdom of Judah and destroyed Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple. The upper classes were exiled to Babylonia.

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In these circumstances we would expect the Judahite exiles to adopt Aramaic, the international lingua franca, as their language, at least in writing. But this is not what happened. Hebrew carried on and was kept alive not only in writing but also, as it seems, in day-to-day speech. As a result, the language thrived throughout the Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods, at least until the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome, the Bar Kokhba Revolt, in 132–135 C.E.

Most of the late Biblical books, the Book of Ben Sira, 90 percent of the Dead Sea Scrolls and most of the earliest rabbinic literature are written in a rich and vigorous Hebrew.

Yes, Hebrew thrived, but something happened to it along the way. Subtle changes in the meaning of words and subtle changes in the use of grammatical constructions altered its nature. It is a process we observe even in the Biblical texts in the later books of the Bible. A phenomenon that illustrates this evolution can be found when words with a general meaning came to be used exclusively to designate specific religious items or concepts. For example, take the Hebrew word torah. In most of the Biblical books, torah simply means “teaching,” or “direction.” In the late books of the Bible, however, torah takes on a different meaning. It now refers to the book in which Jewish law is written down.¹

This process continues into post-Biblical Hebrew, for example, in the Hebrew of the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls.

In short, we see a tendency in the history of the Hebrew language in which words with a general meaning over time receive a special religious meaning, which in many cases (though not always) comes to represent the only meaning of the word. One might say that these words are transferred from the profane to the sacred sphere: They are “devoted” to a particular religious use.

What is important is not the quantity of words that illustrate the change but the direction of the change. As Paul says, “If the dough offered as first fruits is holy, so is the whole lump; and if the root is holy, so are the branches” (Romans 11:16).

What motivated the Judahites to continue to use 049Hebrew during and after the Babylonian Exile? In Babylonia they must have used Aramaic to communicate with their neighbors, as is now attested by a newly discovered archive.^c This was certainly the norm from the Persian period onward. From all we know, these Judahites blended in perfectly in their new surroundings. Nevertheless, it appears that alongside Aramaic, the Judahite community in exile upheld a tradition of speaking and writing in Hebrew. Among the first generation of exiles, this stands to reason, and perhaps among the second generation it remains understandable. But Hebrew continued to be used much longer. When the exiles returned from Babylonia to their homeland in Israel, in small numbers at first, at the end of the sixth century B.C.E. and more massively from the second half of the fifth century onward, they brought Hebrew back with them.

If Hebrew was kept alive among Jews in the diaspora and in the community around the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem, the reason must have been at least partly of a religious nature. Exilic and post-Exilic prophets—Second Isaiah, Haggai, Zechariah—continued to prophesy in Hebrew because they linked up with a pre-Exilic prophetic tradition. Edifying stories, such as those of Jonah and Esther, were told in Hebrew. Hebrew was used in speech as well, although it changed rapidly under the influence of other languages. The Book of Ezekiel contains dozens of loanwords from Babylonian; Exilic and post-Exilic books of the Bible evidence a high proportion of Aramaic loanwords. The latest Biblical books attest around 20 words borrowed from Persian. Although all this evidence comes from written texts, it strongly suggests that Hebrew was spoken, too.

The Exilic community continued to use Hebrew down the generations because they defined their identity in light of texts to which they attributed religious authority. In the late books of the Bible—Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther—an archaic form of Hebrew is reused in a way that indicates it was “lifted” from the earlier text and revivified on the basis of exegesis. A nice example is the Hebrew word yomam, which in classical Hebrew is an adverb, “by day,” but in Nehemiah 9:19 is used to mean “day-time.” The earlier meaning was forgotten, and the later meaning arose on the basis of a similar-sounding word in Aramaic. Why did Nehemiah use an old Hebrew word whose meaning had been forgotten? Because he found it in the Biblical text!

The reuse of an archaic form of language like this has been described as “pseudo-classicism.” Pseudo-classicism sets in the late Biblical books and increases exponentially in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The phenomenon of pseudo-classicism shows that in the late Persian and Hellenistic periods, “classical” Hebrew was not a dead language to be deciphered respectfully, but a living language to be exploited as much as possible. Whether in the diaspora or in their occupied homeland, the Jews considered Scripture their real home country, and its language their native idiom.

The process continues until today. For example, in Modern Hebrew the word for “dwarf” is grammad. This usage is ultimately based on a passage in Ezekiel where a people named gammadim (“Gammadites”) are listed as one of many nations trading with Tyre. In later times, this nation was forgotten, and the name was derived from the noun gomed, meaning “a short cubit.” The active use of the word gammad in the meaning “dwarf” is attested for the first time in 1788 in a work of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah. The process of pseudo-classical derivation characterizes the history of Hebrew over the entire post-Biblical period.

At this point, I suggest, normal human language turns into something else. If Scripture is regarded as divine, and if its language is adopted as a means of communication in preference to all other languages, then this new language is to be regarded as a sacred idiom.

The community of exiles from Judah continued to 062use Hebrew to speak of their religious experience and, so it seems, continued to use Hebrew to carry on with life in general. This decision to continue to use Hebrew was not self-evident, a fact that is emphasized if we compare this decision of the Babylonian exile and diaspora with the western exile and diaspora. Yes, there was a western exile and diaspora, exemplified by the prophet Jeremiah, who fled with a group of exiles to Egypt (see Jeremiah 43–44). As the elite of Jerusalem was led by the Babylonians to the East, other Judahites fled to the West. A sizable colony of Jews was settled in Elephantine, a Nile island in upper Egypt, in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., as we know from papyri and ostraca recovered around the turn of the 19th century.^d Jews in Elephantine observed the Sabbath and the Pesach festival. They had a Temple devoted to the God Yaho, no doubt the same God as designated by the tetragram (“Yahweh”) in the Hebrew Bible. Many of them had names with theophoric endings, attested in the Hebrew Bible: Uriah, Isaiah, Gedaliah, Zechariah (-iah = -yah = divine name). In the ancient documents, they are regularly referred to as Jews, Yehudaie. But we never learn anything about this community using Hebrew. On the contrary, all the documents that have come down to us are written in Aramaic. The different approach of the Jewish community in Egypt shows with particular clarity that the continuation of Hebrew in the Babylonian diaspora was not a necessary choice.

In the Hellenistic period, the western diaspora produced the Septuagint, a full translation of Israel’s Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek. The translation of Scripture, as in Egypt, and the classicizing continuation of Hebrew, as in the East, are in a way polar opposites. In the face of Scriptures written in an ancestral idiom that is on the verge of becoming obsolete, one can opt for translation, transferring the meaning of the text into one’s own world—as in the West. But another option is possible too—to turn one’s back on one’s own world and to project oneself into the world of the ancient texts. The second option is the one taken by the Judahites of the Babylonian exile and followed after them by Judaism of all hues, as it developed in Palestine. The first option, that of translation, was exercised by the Jews of Egypt, who thus followed a distinct path.

In the eastern diaspora, Hebrew changed within the Biblical period, turning from an ordinary language into something different: a holy tongue orienting those who use it toward a history of divine intervention, as related in Scripture. In this sense, Hebrew really is a holy language.

In the Genesis creation narratives, God arguably speaks Hebrew; in fact, everyone speaks Hebrew until the Tower of Babel. If Hebrew were a holy language, one would expect it to be unique—set apart from other languages—but it is not. Perhaps Hebrew did not start out holy—but instead became holy.