Ancient Israelite Languages and Writing Systems

Canaanite, Judean, or Hebrew?

The primary language in ancient Israel was Hebrew, a dialect of the Northwest Semitic languages that included the languages of Canaan (including Phoenician and Moabite) and of Syria (Aramaic). Actually, it was not called “Hebrew” until postbiblical times. Isaiah 19:18 refers to it as “the language of Canaan,” and other passages refer to its southern dialect as “Judean” (2 Kings 18:26; Nehemiah 13:24). Most of our knowledge of ancient Hebrew comes from the Bible, and the Hebrew in the small body of extrabiblical inscriptions corresponds to biblical Hebrew. Of course, Hebrew underwent changes over the course of time, as all languages do.

Modern linguists distinguish four periods in the development of biblical Hebrew:

• Early Biblical Hebrew—the archaic vocabulary and grammar found in several poems, such as the Song of Deborah (Judges 5) and the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32) (see Poetry) are presumed to reflect the Hebrew spoken prior to about the tenth century BCE.
• Classical, or Standard, Biblical Hebrew—the Hebrew of the First Temple period, circa 1000–600 BCE. This is the language of much of the books of Genesis through Kings, some prophetic writings, and some parts of the Ketuvim, or Writings. There is evidence that the Northern Kingdom of Israel spoke a dialect of Hebrew (modern scholars call it “Israelian”) that differed slightly from that spoken in the Southern Kingdom of Judah.
• Transitional Biblical Hebrew—the stage between pre- and postexilic Hebrew, as in the books of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah 40–66.
• Late Biblical Hebrew—the language of the postexilic (Second Temple) period, reflecting considerable influence from Aramaic as well as Akkadian and Persian. This stage is exemplified in Esther, Ecclesiastes, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, the late classical prophets, some psalms, and other parts of the Ketuvim, or Writings.

What about Aramaic?

Aramaic began to play a role in Israel in the eighth century BCE. Originally spoken in Syria (Aram), it was adopted by the Assyrian Empire in its dealings with states west of the Euphrates; it probably facilitated the spread of Mesopotamian culture throughout the Levant. It was understood by some of the leading courtiers of Judah by the end of the century (2 Kings 18:26). Jews increasingly adopted Aramaic as their spoken and written language during the Persian period, when it was the main spoken language in Babylonia and the language of administration and diplomacy in the Persian Empire. It appears in the Bible in substantial passages in Ezra-Nehemiah and Daniel. Aramaic inscriptions and letters were also written by Jews outside the land of Israel, as in the papyri from the Jewish military garrison in Elephantine, Egypt.

The cuneiform tablets pertaining to the Jews in Babylonia after the exile, from Al-Yahudu and nearby towns, were written in Akkadian, the classical language of Babylonia, but the Jewish parties to the documents probably did not understand Akkadian. By that time, Aramaic was the spoken language, and the documents were written for the Jews by Babylonian scribes.

The diminishing use of Hebrew among Jews in the postexilic period is reflected in an episode recorded in the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah relates how the children of Jewish men who had married foreign wives spoke the languages of their mothers and could not speak “Judean” (Nehemiah 13:23–24), which outraged Nehemiah. This is the first known instance of concern for preservation of the Hebrew language as a cultural value.

The development of Hebrew writing

Hebrew, read from right to left, employed a consonantal alphabet of twenty-two characters (diacritical vowel signs were invented only much later, in the last centuries of the first millennium CE), as opposed to the complicated, nonalphabetic cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing systems, which represented words or syllables, used in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The earliest inscriptions from Israelite territory used the Phoenician alphabet. A distinctive Hebrew script developed from the Phoenician alphabet in the ninth century BCE (scholars call this the “old Hebrew script”). Later, in the Persian period, as Jews adopted the Aramaic language, they used its script, which was independently derived from the Phoenician alphabet. In the third century BCE (during the Hellenistic period), Jewish scribes developed a distinctive form of this script, called the “Jewish script” or (mistakenly) the “square script,” which they eventually came to use for biblical and other Hebrew texts. This became the basis of the Hebrew script used today. In an exception to this trend, the preexilic Hebrew script was revived in the late Persian period for use on coins and seals of the province of Yehud (see Ancient Israelite Coins and Scales), perhaps as an expression of Jewish national identity. This revived Hebrew script (scholars call it “paleo-Hebrew”) was later used on seals and coins of the Hasmonean kings (second and first centuries BCE) and coins of the two Jewish revolts against Rome (66–70 and 132–135 CE), and it was sometimes used for biblical manuscripts. It died out among Jews following the second revolt (Bar Kokhba’s) and survived only among the Samaritans. The image above shows three ancient stages in the development of the letters and their modern forms. Note that the use of separate forms of the letters k, m, n, p, and ṣ (ts) within words and at their end was a feature of the Aramaic script that became the basis of the Jewish script.

Writing was done on stone, ceramic containers, and ostraca (broken pieces of pottery). Papyrus and parchment (animal skins) were used as well, but these do not survive well in the moist climate of the land of Israel, and almost no examples remain from before the fourth century BCE. But many letters and legal documents written on papyrus were rolled up, tied with string, and sealed with a lump of clay (a bulla) impressed with either an official or private seal, and many bullas, with impressions of the strings and papyrus fibers on their backs, have been recovered in excavations, a clear indication that papyrus was used extensively (see Seals and Seal Impressions and Bullas from Jerusalem). The earliest surviving copies of biblical books, mostly written on parchment, are among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date from the third century BCE through the first century CE.

Writing served many purposes, from everyday needs (record keeping, legal transactions, and correspondence) to official archives and chronicles of kings, such as the annals mentioned frequently in 1 and 2 Kings. The Bible mentions written texts that played a prominent role in religion. The Ten Commandments were engraved on two stone tablets and stored in the Ark of the Covenant, and copies of God’s laws and teachings were to be read to the people (Exodus 24:7; Deuteronomy 31:10–13; Joshua 8:34–35; 2 Kings 23:2); select verses were to be inscribed on stones, doorposts, and city gates (Deuteronomy 6:9; 27:1–8; Joshua 8:32) and worn on people’s bodies (Deuteronomy 6:8).