Biblical Hebrew, also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language in which the Hebrew Bible and various Israelite inscriptions were written.
It is not spoken in its pure form today, although it is often studied by Jews, Christian theologians, linguists, and Israeli archaeologists to help them gain a deeper understanding of the Hebrew Bible and Semitic philology. Classical Hebrew is also generally taught in public schools in Israel.
Biblical Hebrew and modern Hebrew differ with respect to grammar, vocabulary, and phonology. Although Modern and Biblical Hebrew's grammatical laws often differ, Biblical Hebrew is sometimes used in Modern Hebrew literature, much as archaic and Biblical constructions are used in Modern English literature.
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This article describes the Biblical dialects of Hebrew. These flourished between the 12th and 6th centuries BCE and comprise all of the Hebrew Bible but for several Aramaic sections and isolated loanwords.
Hebrew (עברית) comes from the Hebrew for "to pass over" (עבר). This is most likely a reference to the Hebrews being the ones who "passed over" the Jordan River.
The precise meaning of the term Biblical Hebrew varies with context and may refer to any of the following:
From a linguistic point of view, the Classical Hebrew language is usually divided into two periods: Biblical Hebrew, and Roman Era Hebrew, having very distinct grammatical patterns.
Biblical Hebrew is further divided into the so called 'Golden Age' Hebrew (before 500 BCE) and 'Silver Age' Hebrew (500 BCE to 60 BCE). Silver Age Hebrew has many borrowings from Aramaic, for example the use of the conditional particle (אִלּוּ) replacing (לוּ). Another shibboleth between the two is the use of the relative pronoun (אֲשֶר) (introducing a Restrictive clause, 'that') in the earlier period, being replaced with the clitic ʃe- (-שֶ) in the later, both being used in Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew.
Roman Era Hebrew, or Mishnaic Hebrew, was further influenced by Greek and Persian, mainly through the dialect of Aramaic which was the Lingua franca of the area at the time.
Modern adaptions of Classical Hebrew are in active use today, mostly in the form of various modern Jewish dialects of Hebrew, as well as Samaritan Hebrew language, which is used primarily by the Samaritans.
As Biblical-Hebrew vocalization is derived from the Masoretic system applied to ancient texts, Biblical Hebrew is somewhat a mixture of these elements. It is the mixed language that is discussed in this article.
Most words in Biblical Hebrew are derived from a three "letter" root ("letter" here refers to the consonantal portion of basic words--a better way of looking at the Hebrew word is as a construction of three syllables, each beginning with a consonant and where certain syllables may have "null" vowels) usually a verb form given in the Qal perfect 3rd masculine singular form. There are exceptions to this rule though most of these are loan words from non-Semitic roots. For most English speaking readers who use the Brown-Driver-Briggs Lexicon it is this three letter root word that must be looked up to find a definition.
The standard Hebrew Text for scholarly study is the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, edited by Kittel.
The phonology as reconstructed for Biblical Hebrew is as follows:
| Name | Letter | Phoneme and Allophone (IPA) |
| - allophonically1 | ||
| gîmel | allophonically1 | |
| allophonically1 | ||
| hē | , null at the end of words.2 | |
| wāw | , null after or 2 | |
| zayin | ||
| , (3) | ||
| , null after , , or 2 | ||
| , | - allophonically1 | |
| mēm | , | |
| nûn | , | |
| , (3) | ||
| pēh | , | - allophonically1 |
| , | ||
| (or ) | ||
| rēšh | (trilled like in Arabic) | |
| śhîn/šîn/ | , s, | |
| tāph | - allophonically1 |
The original Hebrew alphabet consisted only of consonants and vowel letters (see Semitic languages). The vowel signs and pronunciation (known as vowel pointings) currently accepted for Biblical Hebrew were created by scholars known as Masoretes after the 5th century AD. These scholars are thought also to have standardized various dialectal differences.[5]
However, it is clear that Classical Hebrew's vowel inventory was not identical to that notated by the Masoretes. For instance, /e/ and /ē/ were both indicated with a tzeire in the Masoretic text, but in Greek transcription (LXX, Origen, etc.) are written with epsilon and eta respectively. This is also backed up by etymological and internal data.[6]
As Biblical Hebrew (BH) evolved from Proto-Semitic (PS) it underwent a number of mergers,[7][8][9]:
ar:لغة عبرية توراتية an:Ebreu biblico cs:Klasická hebrejština da:Klassisk hebraisk fr:Hébreu biblique he:עברית מקראית mk:Библиски хебрејски јазик ru:Древнееврейский язык th:ภาษาฮีบรูไบเบิล