השפה העברית

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Hebrew is a beautiful and ancient language, with a long history and a rich written tradition going back millennia.

The Hebrew language belongs to the Semitic language group, so Hebrew is closely related to such languages as Aramaic, Arabic, ancient Akkadian and several languages in Ethiopia and Eritrea. The Semitic languages in turn belong to the wider Afro-Asiatic family, together with Ancient Egyptian and the Coptic, Berber, Somali and Hausa languages.

Hebrew today has 9 million speakers, mostly living in Israel, and is the official language of the State of Israel, alongside Arabic. Poland has also granted Hebrew official minority language status, in recognition of the historic Jewish community in that country and the use of Hebrew by Jews there for centuries, for prayer, literature, community records, and such things as synagogue signage and tombstone inscriptions still visible to this day. Jews living outside of Israel often spoke a distinct dialect based on a local language with a strong Hebrew-Aramaic component, such as Yiddish, Ladino or Judeo-Arabic. Hebrew in Israel is a living language in its own right, used for all facets of daily life, communication, and cultural expression.

Seemingly an offshoot of the Bronze Age Canaanite langauge, Hebrew was largely mutually intelligible in ancient times with Phoenician, Moabite, Edomite and other languages in the region, and Israelis today can rather easily decipher inscriptions in ancient Hebrew and its sister langauges discovered in archaeological digs.

Hebrew literature's pedigree goes back at least as far as the oldest biblical texts included in the Hebrew Scriptures. The text of the Song of Deborah is considered to be one of the most ancient recorded Hebrew poetry, perhaps around 3150 years old, and the Psalms as well as the Five Books of Moses (the Torah) contain many similarly archaic words and forms. The Hebrew Bible - called the Tanakh in Hebrew, from the first letters of its three primary components: the Torah, the Prophets (Nevi'im) and the Writings (Ketuvim) - contains a wide range of literature, from the Creation story, through the stories of the Patriarchs and the Exodus from Egypt, and historical texts describing subsequent developments, interspersed with poetry and important legal and ethical texts, to the love poetry of the Song of Songs, the wisdom literature exemplified by Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), the book of Iyov (Job) and the Proverbs, and the social-political critiques and divine warnings included in the words of the Prophets.

In classical antiquity, when Israel was dominated by the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, Hebrew literature most notably produced the Mishnah - a compilation of legal traditions, wisdom literature (the Ethics of the Fathers is a chapter in the Mishnah), descriptions of holidays and customs, and of worship as practiced in the Temple of Jerusalem. Also from this period are the Dead Sea Scrolls, and some works known today primarily or exclusively in translation as Apocryphal books of the Bible, though some scraps of their original Hebrew texts have been discovered. The traditional Jewish collection of prayers, the Siddur, and the order of the Pesach (Passover) telling of the Exodus narrative, called the Hagadah, were also primarily set down during this period. Mystical works from antiquity, such as the Sefer ha-Yetzirah, poetically detailing the mysteries of the Creation of the World, survived in their Hebrew originals on the margins of the Jewish tradition, but not lost.

In late antiquity and medieval times - the Byzantine and early Arab periods - Hebrew poetry flourished, particularly in the Land of Israel and neighboring countries, and has left a rich and complex legacy, whether reflecting historical events in the times of the poets, or literary forms that continue to influence Hebrew literature to this day, though some reflect societal realities from bygone eras. Importantly, in the town of Tveryah (Tiberias) on the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, the Hebrew vowel system received its final form about 1100 years ago, and shaped what we know as the Masoretic standard vocalization of the biblical texts. An important product of this period is the manuscript known as the Aleppo Codex, or the Keter Aram Tzova, as well as the Leningrad Codex, both being traditional copies of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Over the past millennium, Hebrew literature has had its share of ups and downs. It continued to be an important vehicle for poetic expression among Jews, reaching notable pinacles of achievement in the Golden Age of Islamic Spain, and in later periods in such places as Italy, Yemen and central and eastern Europe. Hebrew importantly continued to be the default language of Jewish legal discussions (rabbinical responsa) and the language used for disseminating ideas and literature throughout the Jewish world.