Hebrew Language

Hebrew is a Semitic language belonging to the Canaanite branch of the Northwest Semitic family, closely related to Phoenician and ancient Ugaritic. It was the primary language in which the Old Testament was written (with portions of Daniel and Ezra in Aramaic) and the native tongue of the Israelite nation from the patriarchal period through the exile. The language is sometimes called "the language of Canaan" (Isaiah 19:18) or "the Jews' language" (2 Kings 18:26, 28; Isaiah 36:11), and in later Jewish tradition simply "the holy tongue" (leshon ha-qodesh).

The Assyrian Rabshakeh's demand to speak to Jerusalem's leaders "in the Syrian language" rather than Hebrew (2 Kings 18:26; Isaiah 36:11) was a deliberate attempt to undermine morale by letting the common people hear the terms of surrender — the very threat the officials sought to prevent by requesting the diplomatic Aramaic. After the exile, Aramaic became the vernacular of Palestinian Jews, and Nehemiah 13:24 records that children of mixed marriages could not speak "in the Jews' language" — a sign of cultural assimilation that Nehemiah vigorously resisted. In the New Testament period, Hebrew proper coexisted with vernacular Aramaic and Greek in a complex linguistic environment.