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Biblical Hebrew language

Biblical Hebrew language

Overview
Biblical Hebrew also called Classical Hebrew , is the archaic form of the Hebrew language, a Canaanite
Canaanite languages
The Canaanite languages are a subfamily of the Semitic languages, which were spoken by the ancient peoples of the Canaan region, including Canaanites, Israelites and Phoenicians...

 Semitic
Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...

 language spoken in the area known as Canaan
Canaan
Canaan is a historical region roughly corresponding to modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and the western parts of Jordan...

 between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Anatolia and Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by the Levant...

. Biblical Hebrew is attested from about the 10th century BCE, and persisted through the Second Temple
Second Temple
The Jewish Second Temple was an important shrine which stood on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem between 516 BCE and 70 CE. It replaced the First Temple which was destroyed in 586 BCE, when the Jewish nation was exiled to Babylon...

 period (ending in 70 CE). Biblical Hebrew eventually developed into Mishnaic Hebrew, which was spoken until the 2nd century CE. Biblical Hebrew is best-attested in the Hebrew Bible
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible is a term used by biblical scholars outside of Judaism to refer to the Tanakh , a canonical collection of Jewish texts, and the common textual antecedent of the several canonical editions of the Christian Old Testament...

, a document which reflects various stages of the Hebrew language in its consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...

al skeleton, as well as a vocalic
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...

 system which was added later, in the Middle Ages. There is also some evidence of regional dialectal variation, including differences between Biblical Hebrew as spoken in the northern Kingdom of Israel and in the southern Kingdom of Judah
Kingdom of Judah
The Kingdom of Judah was a Jewish state established in the Southern Levant during the Iron Age. It is often referred to as the "Southern Kingdom" to distinguish it from the northern Kingdom of Israel....

.
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Encyclopedia
Biblical Hebrew also called Classical Hebrew , is the archaic form of the Hebrew language, a Canaanite
Canaanite languages
The Canaanite languages are a subfamily of the Semitic languages, which were spoken by the ancient peoples of the Canaan region, including Canaanites, Israelites and Phoenicians...

 Semitic
Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...

 language spoken in the area known as Canaan
Canaan
Canaan is a historical region roughly corresponding to modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and the western parts of Jordan...

 between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Anatolia and Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by the Levant...

. Biblical Hebrew is attested from about the 10th century BCE, and persisted through the Second Temple
Second Temple
The Jewish Second Temple was an important shrine which stood on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem between 516 BCE and 70 CE. It replaced the First Temple which was destroyed in 586 BCE, when the Jewish nation was exiled to Babylon...

 period (ending in 70 CE). Biblical Hebrew eventually developed into Mishnaic Hebrew, which was spoken until the 2nd century CE. Biblical Hebrew is best-attested in the Hebrew Bible
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible is a term used by biblical scholars outside of Judaism to refer to the Tanakh , a canonical collection of Jewish texts, and the common textual antecedent of the several canonical editions of the Christian Old Testament...

, a document which reflects various stages of the Hebrew language in its consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...

al skeleton, as well as a vocalic
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...

 system which was added later, in the Middle Ages. There is also some evidence of regional dialectal variation, including differences between Biblical Hebrew as spoken in the northern Kingdom of Israel and in the southern Kingdom of Judah
Kingdom of Judah
The Kingdom of Judah was a Jewish state established in the Southern Levant during the Iron Age. It is often referred to as the "Southern Kingdom" to distinguish it from the northern Kingdom of Israel....

.

Biblical Hebrew has been written with a number of different writing systems. The Hebrews adopted the Phoenician script around the 12th century BCE, which developed into the Paleo-Hebrew script. This was retained by the Samaritans, who use the descendent Samaritan script to this day. However the Aramaic script gradually displaced the Paleo-Hebrew script for the Jews, and it became the source for the modern Hebrew alphabet
Hebrew alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...

. All of these scripts were lacking letters to represent all of the sounds of Biblical Hebrew, though these sounds are reflected in Greek and Latin transcriptions of the time. These scripts originally only indicated consonants, but certain letters, known as matres lectionis, became increasingly used to mark vowels. In the Middle Ages various systems of diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...

s were developed to mark the vowels in Hebrew manuscripts; of these, only the Tiberian system
Tiberian vocalization
The Tiberian vocalization is a system of diacritics devised by the Masoretes to add to the consonantal Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible; this system soon became used to vocalize other texts as well...

 is still in wide use.

Biblical Hebrew possessed a series of "emphatic" consonants whose precise articulation is disputed, likely ejective or pharyngealized. Earlier Biblical Hebrew possessed three consonants which did not have their own letters in the writing system, but over time they merged with other consonants. The stop consonant
Stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...

s developed fricative allophones under the influence of Aramaic, and these sounds eventually became marginally phonemic. The pharyngeal
Pharyngeal consonant
A pharyngeal consonant is a type of consonant which is articulated with the root of the tongue against the pharynx.-Pharyngeal consonants in the IPA:Pharyngeal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet :...

 and glottal
Glottal consonant
Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...

 phonemes underwent weakening in some regional dialects, as reflected in the modern Samaritan Hebrew reading tradition. The vowel system of Biblical Hebrew changed dramatically over time and is reflected differently in the ancient Greek and Latin transcriptions, medieval vocalization systems, and modern reading traditions.

Biblical Hebrew had a typical Semitic morphology, placing triconsonantal roots into patterns to form words. Biblical Hebrew distinguished two genders
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...

 (masculine, feminine), three numbers
Grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....

 (singular, plural, and uncommonly dual). Verbs were marked for voice
Voice (grammar)
In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments . When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice...

 and mood
Grammatical mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...

, and had two conjugations which may have indicated aspect
Grammatical aspect
In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...

 and/or tense
Grammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...

 (a matter of debate). The tense or aspect of verbs was also influenced by the conjugation ו, in the so-called waw consecutive construction. Default word order was verb–subject–object, and verbs inflected for the number, gender, and person
Grammatical person
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...

 of their subject. Pronominal suffixes could be appended to verbs (to indicate object) or nouns (to indicate possession
Possession (linguistics)
Possession, in the context of linguistics, is an asymmetric relationship between two constituents, the referent of one of which possesses the referent of the other ....

), and nouns had special construct forms
Status constructus
The construct state or status constructus is a noun form occurring in Afro-Asiatic languages. It is particularly common in Semitic languages , Berber languages, and in the extinct Egyptian language...

 for use in possessive constructions.

Nomenclature


The earliest written sources refer to Biblical Hebrew by the name of the land in which it was spoken: שפת כנען 'the language of Canaan' (see Isaiah 19:18). The Hebrew Bible also shows that the language was called יהודית 'Judaean, Judahite' (see, for example, 2 Kings 18:26,28). In the Hellenistic period Greek writings use the names Hebraios, Hebraïsti (Josephus, Antiquities I, 1:2, etc.), and in Mishnaic Hebrew we find עברית 'Hebrew' and לשון עברית 'Hebrew language' (Mishnah Gittin 9:8, etc.). The origin of this term is obscure; suggested origins include the Biblical Eber
Eber
Eber is an ancestor of the Israelites, according to the "Table of Nations" in and . He was a great-grandson of Noah's son Shem and the father of Peleg born when Eber was 34 years old, and of Joktan. He was the son of Shelah a distant ancestor of Abraham...

, the ethnonym
Ethnonym
An ethnonym is the name applied to a given ethnic group. Ethnonyms can be divided into two categories: exonyms and autonyms or endonyms .As an example, the ethnonym for...

s Ḫabiru, Ḫapiru, and ˁApiru found in sources from Egypt and the near east, and a derivation from the root עבר 'to pass' alluding to crossing over the Jordan river. Jews also began referring to Hebrew as לשון הקדש 'the holy tongue' in Mishnaic Hebrew.

The term Classical Hebrew may include all pre-medieval dialects of Hebrew, including Mishnaic Hebrew, or it may be limited to Hebrew contemporaneous with the Hebrew Bible. The term Biblical Hebrew refers to pre-Mishnaic dialects (sometimes excluding Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew). The term 'Biblical Hebrew' may or may not include extra-Biblical texts, such as inscriptions (e.g. the Siloam inscription
Siloam inscription
The Siloam inscription or Silwan inscription is a passage of inscribed text found in the Hezekiah tunnel which brings water from the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam, located in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. The inscription records the construction of the tunnel in the 8th century...

), and generally also includes later vocalization traditions for the Hebrew Bible's consonantal text, most commonly the early-medieval Tiberian vocalization
Tiberian vocalization
The Tiberian vocalization is a system of diacritics devised by the Masoretes to add to the consonantal Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible; this system soon became used to vocalize other texts as well...

.

History



The archeological record for the prehistory of Biblical Hebrew is far more complete than the record of Biblical Hebrew itself. Early Northwest Semitic
Northwest Semitic languages
The Northwest Semitic languages form a medium-level division of the Semitic language family. The languages of this group are spoken by approximately eight million people today. The group is generally divided into three branches: Ugaritic , Canaanite and Aramaic...

 (ENWS) materials are attested from 2350 BCE to 1200 BCE, the end of the Bronze Age
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...

. The Northwest Semitic languages, including Hebrew, differentiated noticeably during the Iron Age (1200–540 BCE), although in its earliest stages Biblical Hebrew was not highly differentiated from Ugaritic
Ugaritic language
The following table shows Proto-Semitic phonemes and their correspondences among Ugaritic, Arabic and Tiberian Hebrew:-Grammar:Ugaritic is an inflected language, and as a Semitic language its grammatical features are highly similar to those found in Classical Arabic and Akkadian...

 and Amarna Canaanite
Amarna letters
The Amarna letters are an archive of correspondence on clay tablets, mostly diplomatic, between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru during the New Kingdom...

.

Hebrew developed during the latter half of the second millennium BCE between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Anatolia and Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by the Levant...

, an area known as Canaan
Canaan
Canaan is a historical region roughly corresponding to modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and the western parts of Jordan...

. The Israelite tribes established a kingdom in Canaan at the beginning of the first millennium BCE, which later split into the kingdom of Israel in the north and the kingdom of Judah in the south after a dispute of succession. The earliest Hebrew writing yet discovered was found at Khirbet Qeiyafa
Khirbet Qeiyafa
Khirbet Qeiyafa is the site of an ancient city overlooking the Elah Valley. The ruins of the fortress were uncovered in 2007, near the Israeli city of Beit Shemesh, 20 miles from Jerusalem. It covers nearly six acres and is encircled by a 700-meter long city wall constructed of stones weighing...

 and dates to the 10th century BCE.

The kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BCE. The kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, its higher classes exiled and the first Temple destroyed. Later the Persians made Judah a province and permitted Jewish exiles to return and rebuild the Temple. In this period of turmoil, the Hebrews were greatly influenced by Aramaic. Aramaic became the common language in the north, in Galilee
Galilee
Galilee , is a large region in northern Israel which overlaps with much of the administrative North District of the country. Traditionally divided into Upper Galilee , Lower Galilee , and Western Galilee , extending from Dan to the north, at the base of Mount Hermon, along Mount Lebanon to the...

 and Samaria
Samaria
Samaria, or the Shomron is a term used for a mountainous region roughly corresponding to the northern part of the West Bank.- Etymology :...

. Hebrew remained in use in Judah; however the returning exiles brought back Aramaic influence, and Aramaic was used for communicating with other ethnic groups during the Persian period. Alexander conquered Judah in 332 BCE, beginning the period of Hellenistic (Greek) domination. During the Hellenistic period Judea became independent under the Hasmonean
Hasmonean
The Hasmonean dynasty , was the ruling dynasty of Judea and surrounding regions during classical antiquity. Between c. 140 and c. 116 BCE, the dynasty ruled semi-autonomously from the Seleucids in the region of Judea...

s, but later the Romans ended their independence, making Herod the Great
Herod the Great
Herod , also known as Herod the Great , was a Roman client king of Judea. His epithet of "the Great" is widely disputed as he is described as "a madman who murdered his own family and a great many rabbis." He is also known for his colossal building projects in Jerusalem and elsewhere, including his...

 their governor. One Jewish revolt against the Romans led to the destruction of the Second Temple
Second Temple
The Jewish Second Temple was an important shrine which stood on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem between 516 BCE and 70 CE. It replaced the First Temple which was destroyed in 586 BCE, when the Jewish nation was exiled to Babylon...

 in 70 CE, and the second Bar-Kochba revolt in 132-135 CE led to the departure of the Jewish population of Judea.

Biblical Hebrew after the Second Temple period evolved into Mishnaic Hebrew, which ceased being spoken and developed into a literary language around 200 CE. Hebrew continued to be used as a literary and liturgical language in the form of Medieval Hebrew
Medieval Hebrew
Medieval Hebrew has many features that distinguish it from older forms of Hebrew. These affect grammar, syntax, sentence structure, and also include a wide variety of new lexical items, which are usually based on older forms....

, and Hebrew began a revival process in the 19th century, culminating in Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew , also known as Israeli Hebrew or Modern Israeli Hebrew, is the language spoken in Israel and in some Jewish communities worldwide, from the early 20th century to the present....

 becoming the official language of the State of Israel. Currently, Classical Hebrew is generally taught in public schools in Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

, and Biblical Hebrew forms are sometimes used in Modern Hebrew literature, much as archaic and Biblical constructions are used in Modern English literature. Since Modern Hebrew contains many Biblical elements, Biblical Hebrew is fairly intelligible to Modern Hebrew speakers.

The primary source of Biblical Hebrew material is the Hebrew Bible
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible is a term used by biblical scholars outside of Judaism to refer to the Tanakh , a canonical collection of Jewish texts, and the common textual antecedent of the several canonical editions of the Christian Old Testament...

. Biblical Hebrew is meagerly attested from epigraphic
Epigraphy
Epigraphy Epigraphy Epigraphy (from the , literally "on-writing", is the study of inscriptions or epigraphs as writing; that is, the science of identifying the graphemes and of classifying their use as to cultural context and date, elucidating their meaning and assessing what conclusions can be...

 materials, and the Hebrew in these materials differs little from the variety of Hebrew in the Hebrew Bible. The damp climate of Palestine caused the rapid deterioration of papyrus and parchment documents, in contrast to the dry environment of Egypt, and the survival of the Hebrew Bible may be attributed to scribal determination in preserving the text through copying. No manuscript of the Hebrew Bible dates to before 400 BCE, although two silver rolls (the Ketef Hinnom
Ketef Hinnom
Ketef Hinnom is an archaeological site southwest of the Old City of Jerusalem, adjacent to St. Andrew's Church of Scotland. The site consists of a series of rock-hewn burial chambers based on natural caverns...

 scrolls) from the 7th or 6th century BCE show a version of the priestly blessing
Priestly Blessing
The Priestly Blessing, , also known in Hebrew as Nesiat Kapayim, , or Dukhanen , is a Jewish prayer recited by Kohanim during certain Jewish services...

. Vowel and cantillation
Cantillation
Cantillation is the ritual chanting of readings from the Hebrew Bible in synagogue services. The chants are written and notated in accordance with the special signs or marks printed in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible to complement the letters and vowel points...

 marks were added to the older consonantal layer of the Bible between 600 CE and the beginning of the 10th century.This is known because the final redaction of the Talmud
Talmud
The Talmud is a central text of mainstream Judaism. It takes the form of a record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history....

, which does not mention these additions, was ca. 60 CE, while dated manuscripts with vocalization are found in the beginning of the tenth century. See
The scholars who preserved the pronunciation of the Bibles were known as the Masoretes
Masoretes
The Masoretes were groups of mostly Karaite scribes and scholars working between the 7th and 11th centuries, based primarily in present-day Israel in the cities of Tiberias and Jerusalem, as well as in Iraq...

. The most well-preserved system that developed, and the only still used is the Tiberian vocalization, but both Babylonian and Palestinian vocalizations are also attested. The Palestinian system was preserved mainly in piyyut
Piyyut
A piyyut or piyut is a Jewish liturgical poem, usually designated to be sung, chanted, or recited during religious services. Piyyutim have been written since Temple times...

im, which contain Biblical quotations.

Classification


Biblical Hebrew is a Northwest
Northwest Semitic languages
The Northwest Semitic languages form a medium-level division of the Semitic language family. The languages of this group are spoken by approximately eight million people today. The group is generally divided into three branches: Ugaritic , Canaanite and Aramaic...

 Semitic language of the Canaanite
Canaanite languages
The Canaanite languages are a subfamily of the Semitic languages, which were spoken by the ancient peoples of the Canaan region, including Canaanites, Israelites and Phoenicians...

 subgroup.

As a Northwest Semitic language, Hebrew shows the shift of initial */w/ to /j/, a similar independent pronoun system to the other Northwest Semitic languages (with third person pronouns never containing /ʃ/), some archaic forms, such as /naħnu/ 'we', first person singular pronominal suffix -i or -ya, and /n/ commonly preceding pronominal suffixes. Case endings are found in Northwest Semitic languages in the second millennium BCE, but disappear almost totally afterwards. Mimation
Mimation
Mimation refers to the suffixed   which occurs in some Semitic languages.This occurs in Akkadian on singular nouns. It was also present in proto-Semitic....

 is absent in singular nouns, but is often retained in the plural, as in Hebrew.

The Northwest Semitic languages formed a dialect continuum in the Iron Age
Iron Age
The Iron Age is the archaeological period generally occurring after the Bronze Age, marked by the prevalent use of iron. The early period of the age is characterized by the widespread use of iron or steel. The adoption of such material coincided with other changes in society, including differing...

 (1200-540 BCE), with Phoenician and Aramaic on each extreme. Hebrew is classed with Phoenician in the Canaanite subgroup, which also includes Ammonite
Ammonite language
The Ammonite language is the extinct Canaanite language of the Ammonite people mentioned in the Bible, who used to live in modern-day Jordan, and after whom its capital Amman is named. Only fragments of their language survive - chiefly the 9th century BC , the 7th-6th century BC Tell Siran bronze...

, Edomite
Edomite language
The Edomite language was a Canaanite language spoken by the Edomites in southwestern Jordan in the first millennium BC. It is known only from a very small corpus. In early times, it seems to have been written with a Canaanite alphabet; like the Moabite language, it retained feminine -t. However, in...

, and Moabite
Moabite language
The Moabite language is an extinct Canaanite language, spoken in Moab in the early first millennium BC. Most of our knowledge about Moabite comes from the Mesha Stele, as well as the El-Kerak Stela. The main features distinguishing Moabite from fellow Canaanite languages such as Hebrew are: a...

. Moabite might be considered a Hebrew dialect, though it possessed distinctive Aramaic features. Although Ugaritic
Ugaritic language
The following table shows Proto-Semitic phonemes and their correspondences among Ugaritic, Arabic and Tiberian Hebrew:-Grammar:Ugaritic is an inflected language, and as a Semitic language its grammatical features are highly similar to those found in Classical Arabic and Akkadian...

 shows a large degree of affinity to Hebrew in poetic structure, vocabulary, and some grammar, it lacks some Canaanite features (like the Canaanite shift
Canaanite shift
In historical linguistics, the Canaanite shift is a sound change that took place in the Canaanite dialects, which belong to the Northwest Semitic branch of the Semitic languages family. This sound change caused Proto-NW-Semitic *ā to turn into ō in Proto-Canaanite...

 and the shift */ð/ > /z/), and its similarities are more likely a result of either contact or preserved archaism.

Hebrew underwent the Canaanite vowel shift, where Proto-Semitic /aː/ tended to shift to /oː/, perhaps when stressed. Hebrew also shares with the Canaanite languages the shifts */ð/ > /z/, */ðʼ/ and */ɬʼ/ > /sʼ/, widespread reduction of diphthongs, loss of intervocalic /h/, and assimilation of non-final /n/ to the following consonant. Typical Canaanite words in Hebrew include: גג 'roof' שלחן 'table' חלון 'window' ישן 'old (thing)' זקן 'old (person)' גרש 'expel'. Morphological Canaanite features in Hebrew include the masculine plural marker -ם, first person singular pronoun אנכי, interrogative pronoun מי, definite article ה- (appearing in the first millennium BCE), and third person plural feminine verbal marker .

As Biblical Hebrew evolved from Proto-Semitic it underwent a number of consonantal mergers, parallel with those in other Canaanite languages.However it is noteworthy that Akkadian shares many of these sound shifts but is less closely related to Hebrew than Aramaic. See There is no evidence that these mergers occurred after the adaptation of the Hebrew alphabet.However it should be noted that, for example, when Old Aramaic borrowed the Canaanite alphabet it still had interdentals, but marked them with what they merged with in Canaanite. For instance 'ox' was written שר but pronounced with an initial /θ/. The same phenomenon also occurred when the Arabs adopted the Nabatean alphabet. See .

Eras


Biblical Hebrew as preserved in the Hebrew Bible
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible is a term used by biblical scholars outside of Judaism to refer to the Tanakh , a canonical collection of Jewish texts, and the common textual antecedent of the several canonical editions of the Christian Old Testament...

 is composed of multiple linguistic layers. The consonantal skeleton of the text is the most ancient, while the vocalization and cantillation
Cantillation
Cantillation is the ritual chanting of readings from the Hebrew Bible in synagogue services. The chants are written and notated in accordance with the special signs or marks printed in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible to complement the letters and vowel points...

 are later additions reflecting a later stage of the language. These additions were added after 600 CE; Hebrew had already ceased being used as a spoken language around 200 CE. Biblical Hebrew as reflected in the consonantal text of the Bible and in extra-Biblical inscriptions may be subdivided by era.

The oldest form of Biblical Hebrew, Archaic Hebrew, is found in poetic sections of the Bible and inscriptions dating to around 1000 BCE, the early Monarchic Period. This stage is also known as Old Hebrew or Paleo-Hebrew, and is the oldest stratum of Biblical Hebrew. The oldest known artifacts of Archaic Biblical Hebrew are various sections of the Tanakh
Tanakh
The Tanakh is a name used in Judaism for the canon of the Hebrew Bible. The Tanakh is also known as the Masoretic Text or the Miqra. The name is an acronym formed from the initial Hebrew letters of the Masoretic Text's three traditional subdivisions: The Torah , Nevi'im and Ketuvim —hence...

, including the Song of Moses
Song of Moses
The Song of Moses in this article relates to the name sometimes given to the poem that appears in Deuteronomy of the Hebrew Bible written/orated just prior to Moses' death atop Mount Nebo....

 (Exodus 15) and the Song of Deborah (Judges
Book of Judges
The Book of Judges is the seventh book of the Hebrew bible and the Christian Old Testament. Its title describes its contents: it contains the history of Biblical judges, divinely inspired prophets whose direct knowledge of Yahweh allows them to act as decision-makers for the Israelites, as...

 5). Biblical poetry uses a number of distinct lexical items, for example חזה for prose ראה 'see', כביר for גדול 'great'. Some have cognates in other Northwest Semitic languages, for example פעל 'do' and חָרוּץ 'gold' which are common in Canaanite and Ugaritic. Grammatical differences include the use of זה, זוֹ, and זוּ as relative particles, negative בל, and various differences in verbal and pronominal morphology and syntax.

Later pre-exilic Biblical Hebrew (such as is found in prose sections of the Pentateuch, Nevi'im
Nevi'im
Nevi'im is the second of the three major sections in the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh. It falls between the Torah and Ketuvim .Nevi'im is traditionally divided into two parts:...

, and some Ketuvim
Ketuvim
Ketuvim or Kəṯûḇîm in actual Biblical Hebrew is the third and final section of the Tanak , after Torah and Nevi'im . In English translations of the Hebrew Bible, this section is usually entitled "Writings" or "Hagiographa"...

) is known as 'Biblical Hebrew proper' or 'Standard Biblical Hebrew'. This is dated to the period from the 8th to the 6th century BCE. In contrast to Archaic Hebrew, Standard Biblical Hebrew is more consistent in using the definite article ה-, the accusative marker את, distinguishing between simple and waw-consecutive
Waw-consecutive
The Waw-consecutive or Vav-consecutive is a grammatical construction in Classical Hebrew. It involves prefixing a verb form with the letter waw in order to change its aspect.-Waw-conjunctive and waw-consecutive:...

 verb forms, and in using particles like אשר and כי rather than asyndeton
Asyndeton
Asyndeton is a stylistic scheme in which conjunctions are deliberately omitted from a series of related clauses. Examples are veni, vidi, vici and its English translation "I came, I saw, I conquered." Its use can have the effect of speeding up the rhythm of a passage and making a single idea more...

.

Biblical Hebrew from after the Babylonian exile in 587 BCE is known as 'Late Biblical Hebrew'. Late Biblical Hebrew shows Aramaic influence in phonology, morphology, and lexicon, and this trend is also evident in the later-developed Tiberian vocalization system.

Qumran Hebrew, attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Dead Sea scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name...

 from ca. 200 BCE to 70 CE, is a continuation of Late Biblical Hebrew. Qumran Hebrew may be considered an intermediate stage between Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew, though Qumran Hebrew shows its own idiosyncratic dialectal features.

Dialects


Dialect variation in Biblical Hebrew is attested to by the well-known shibboleth
Shibboleth
A shibboleth is a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important...

 incident of Judges 12:6, where Jephthah's forces from Gilead
Gilead
In the Bible "Gilead" means hill of testimony or mound of witness, , a mountainous region east of the Jordan River, situated in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It is also referred to by the Aramaic name Yegar-Sahadutha, which carries the same meaning as the Hebrew . From its mountainous character...

 caught Ephraimites trying to cross the Jordan river by making them say שִׁבֹּ֤לֶת ('ear of corn') The Ephraimites' identity was given away by their pronunciation: . The apparent conclusion is that the Ephraimite dialect had /s/ for standard /ʃ/. As an alternative explanation, it has been suggested that the proto-Semitic phoneme */θ/, which shifted to /ʃ/ in most dialects of Hebrew, may have been retained in the Hebrew of the trans-Jordan.As a consequence this would leave open the possibility that other proto-Semitic phonemes (such as }) may have been preserved regionally at one point See However, there is evidence that the word שִׁבֹּ֤לֶת had initial consonant } in proto-Semitic, contradicting this theory.

Hebrew as spoken in the northern Kingdom of Israel, known also as Israelian Hebrew
Israelian Hebrew
Israelian Hebrew is a proposed northern dialect of biblical Hebrew . It is proposed as an explanation for various irregular linguistic features of the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible. It competes with the alternative explanation that such features are Aramaisms, indicative either of late dates...

, shows phonological, lexical, and grammatical differences from southern dialects. The Northern dialect spoken around Samaria shows more frequent simplification of /aj/ into /eː/ as attested by the Samaria ostraca (8th century BCE), e.g. ין (= /jeːn/ < */jajn/ 'wine'), while the Southern (Judean) dialect instead adds in an epenthetic vowel /i/, added halfway through the first millennium BCE (יין = /ˈjajin/).Such contraction is also found in Ugaritic, the El-Amarna letters, and in Phoenician, while the anaptyctic vowel is found in Old Aramaic and Deir Alla. The word play in Amos
Book of Amos
The Book of Amos is a prophetic book of the Hebrew Bible, one of the Twelve Minor Prophets. Amos, an older contemporary of Hosea and Isaiah, was active c. 750 BCE during the reign of Jeroboam II, making the Book of Amos the first biblical prophetic book written. Amos lived in the kingdom of Judah...

 8:1–2 כְּלוּב קַ֫יִץ... בָּא הַקֵּץ may reflect this: given that Amos was addressing the population of the Northern Kingdom, the vocalization *קֵיץ would be more forceful. Other possible Northern features include use of שֶ- 'who, that', forms like דֵעָה 'to know' rather than דַעַת and infinitives of certain verbs of the form עֲשוֹ 'to do' rather than . The Samaria ostraca also show שת for standard שנה 'year', as in Aramaic.

The guttural phonemes /ħ ʕ h ʔ/ merged over time in some dialects. This was found in Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew, but Jerome
Jerome
Saint Jerome was a Roman Christian priest, confessor, theologian and historian, and who became a Doctor of the Church. He was the son of Eusebius, of the city of Stridon, which was on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia...

 attested to the existence of contemporaneous Hebrew speakers who still distinguished pharyngeals. Samaritan Hebrew also shows a general attrition of these phonemes, though /ʕ ħ/ are occasionally preserved as [ʕ].

Orthography



value
(Pre-Exilic)
(IPA)
|-
! Aleph
Aleph
* Aleph or Alef is the first letter of the Semitic abjads descended from Proto-Canaanite, Arabic alphabet, Phoenician alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet-People:*Aleph , an Italo disco artist and alias of Dave Rodgers...


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| א
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠀ
|align="center"| ʔ, ∅
|-
! Beth
Bet (letter)
Bet, Beth, Beh, or Vet is the second letter of many Semitic abjads, including Arabic alphabet , Aramaic, Hebrew , Phoenician and Syriac...


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ב
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠁ
|align="center"| b
|-
! Gimel
|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ג
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠂ
|align="center"| ɡ
|-
! Daleth
|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ד
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠃ
|align="center"| d
|-
! He
He (letter)
He is the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician , Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic . Its sound value is a voiceless glottal fricative ....


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ה
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠄ
|align="center"| h, ∅
|-
! Waw
Waw (letter)
Waw is the sixth letter of the Northwest Semitic family of scripts, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic ....


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ו
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠅ
|align="center"| w, ∅
|-
! Zayin
Zayin
Zayin is the seventh letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Aramaic , Hebrew , Syriac and Perso-Arabic alphabet...


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ז
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠆ
|align="center"| z
|-
! Heth
Heth
-People:* Children of Heth, a Canaanite nation in the Hebrew Bible, purportedly named after Heth, son of Canaan, son of Ham, son of Noah* figures in the Book of Mormon:** Heth , an early Jaredite** Heth a later Jaredite...


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ח
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠇ
|align="center"| ħ, χ
|-
! Teth
Teth
' is the ninth letter of many Semitic abjads , including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Tet , Syriac and Arabic ; it is 9th in abjadi order and 16th in modern Arabic order....


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ט
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠈ
|align="center"| tʼ
|-
! Yodh
Yodh
Yodh is the tenth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Yud , Syriac and Arabic...


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| י
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠉ
|align="center"| j, ∅
|-
! Kaph
Kaph
Kaph is the eleventh letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Kaf , Arabic alphabet , Persian alphabet...


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| כ, ך
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠊ
|align="center"| k
|-
! Lamedh
Lamedh
Lamed or Lamedh is the twelfth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Lamed and Arabic alphabet . Its sound value is .The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Lambda , Latin L, and Cyrillic Л.-Origins:...


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ל
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠋ
|align="center"| l
|-
! Mem
|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| מ, ם
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠌ
|align="center"| m
|-
! Nun
Nun (letter)
Nun is the fourteenth letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet . It is the third letter in Thaana , pronounced as "noonu"...


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| נ, ן
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠍ
|align="center"| n
|-
! Samekh
Samekh
Samekh or Simketh is the fifteenth letter in many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic, representing . The Arabic alphabet, however, uses a letter based on Phoenician šin to represent ; however, that glyph takes Samekh's place in the traditional Abjadi order of the Arabic...


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ס
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠎ
|align="center"| s
|-
! Ayin
Ayin
' or ' is the sixteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic . It is the twenty-first letter in the new Persian alphabet...


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ע
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠏ
|align="center"| ʕ, ʁ
|-
! Pe
Pe (letter)
Pe is the seventeenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Pei and Persian, Arabic ....


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| פ, ף
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠐ
|align="center"| p
|-
! Sadhe
|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| צ, ץ
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠑ
|align="center"| sʼ
|-
! Qoph
Qoph
Qoph or Qop is the nineteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet . Its sound value is an emphatic or . The OHED gives the letter Qoph a transliteration value of Q or a K and a final transliteration value as a ck...


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ק
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠒ
|align="center"| q or kʼ
|-
! Resh
Resh
Resh is the twentieth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet . Its sound value is one of a number of rhotic consonants: usually or , but also or in Hebrew....


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ר
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠓ
|align="center"| r
|-
! Shin
Shin (letter)
Shin literally means "Sharp" ; It is the twenty-first letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Aramaic/Hebrew , and Arabic ....


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ש
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠔ
|align="center"| ʃ, ɬ
|-
! Taw
Taw
Taw may refer to:* Taw , the twenty-second letter in many Semitic alphabets* Taw , the collection of all cardinal numbers* the shooter marble in a game of marbles* The River Taw in Devon, England* a method to produce white leather...


|align="center"|
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ת
|align="center" style="font-size:200%"| ࠕ
|align="center"| t
|}

The earliest Hebrew writing yet discovered, found at Khirbet Qeiyafa
Khirbet Qeiyafa
Khirbet Qeiyafa is the site of an ancient city overlooking the Elah Valley. The ruins of the fortress were uncovered in 2007, near the Israeli city of Beit Shemesh, 20 miles from Jerusalem. It covers nearly six acres and is encircled by a 700-meter long city wall constructed of stones weighing...

, dates to the 10th century BCE. The 15 cm x 16.5 cm (5.9 in x 6.5 in) trapezoid pottery sherd
Sherd
In archaeology, a sherd is commonly a historic or prehistoric fragment of pottery, although the term is occasionally used to refer to fragments of stone and glass vessels as well....

 (ostracon
Ostracon
An ostracon is a piece of pottery , usually broken off from a vase or other earthenware vessel. In archaeology, ostraca may contain scratched-in words or other forms of writing which may give clues as to the time when the piece was in use...

) has five lines of text written in ink written in the Proto-Canaanite alphabet
Proto-Canaanite alphabet
Proto-Canaanite is the name given to the Proto-Sinaitic script when found in Canaan. the early Phoenician script before some cut-off date, typically 1050 BCE. The Phoenician, Hebrew, and other Canaanite dialects were largely indistinguishable before that time...

 (the old form of the Phoenician alphabet). The tablet is written from left to right, indicating that Hebrew writing was still in the formative stage.

The Israelite tribes who settled in the land of Israel adopted the Phoenician script
Phoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia...

 around the 12th century BCE, as found in the Gezer calender (c. 10th century BCE). This script developed into the Paleo-Hebrew script in the 10th or 9th centuries BCE. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet's main differences from from the Phoenician script were "a curving to the left of the dowstrokes in the 'long-legged' letter-signs... the consistent use of a Waw with a concave top, [and an] x-shaped Taw."At times the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, and Philistines would also use the Paleo-Hebrew script. See The oldest inscriptions in Paleo-Hebrew script are dated to around the middle of the 9th century BCE, the most famous being the Mesha Stele
Mesha Stele
The Mesha Stele is a black basalt stone bearing an inscription by the 9th century BC ruler Mesha of Moab in Jordan....

 in the Moabite language
Moabite language
The Moabite language is an extinct Canaanite language, spoken in Moab in the early first millennium BC. Most of our knowledge about Moabite comes from the Mesha Stele, as well as the El-Kerak Stela. The main features distinguishing Moabite from fellow Canaanite languages such as Hebrew are: a...

 (which might be considered a dialect of Hebrew). The ancient Hebrew script was in continuous use until the early 6th century BCE, the end of the First Temple period. In the Second Temple Period the Paleo-Hebrew script gradually fell into disuse, and was completely abandoned among the Jews after the failed Bar Kochba revolt. The Samaritans retained the ancient Hebrew alphabet, which evolved into the modern Samaritan alphabet
Samaritan alphabet
The Samaritan alphabet is used by the Samaritans for religious writings, including the Samaritan Pentateuch, writings in Samaritan Hebrew, and for commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic and occasionally Arabic....

.

By the end of the First Temple period the Aramaic script
Aramaic alphabet
The Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BC. The letters all represent consonants, some of which are matres lectionis, which also indicate long vowels....

, a separate descendant of the Phoenician script, became widespread throughout the region, gradually displacing Paleo-Hebrew. The oldest documents that have been found in the Aramaic Script are fragments of the scrolls of Exodus, Samuel, and Jeremiah found among the Dead Sea scrolls, dating from the late 3rd and early 2nd centuries BCE. It seems that the earlier Biblical books were originally written in the Paleo-Hebrew script, while the later books were written directly in the later Assyrian script. Some Qumran texts written in the Assyrian script write the tetragrammaton
Tetragrammaton
The term Tetragrammaton refers to the name of the God of Israel YHWH used in the Hebrew Bible.-Hebrew Bible:...

 and some other divine names in Paleo-Hebrew, and this practice is also found in several Jewish-Greek Biblical translations.Though some of these translations wrote the tetragrammaton in the square script See While spoken Hebrew continued to evolve into Mishnaic Hebrew, the scribal tradition for writing the Torah gradually developed. A number of regional "book-hand" styles developed for the purpose of Torah manuscripts and occasionally other literary works, distinct from the calligraphic styles used mainly for private purposes. The Sephardi and Ashkenazi book-hand styles were later adapted to printed fonts after the invention of the printing press. The modern Hebrew alphabet
Hebrew alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...

, also known as the Assyrian or Square script, is a descendant of the Aramaic alphabet.

The Phoenician script had dropped five characters by the 12th century BCE, reflecting the language's twenty-two consonantal phonemes. As a result, the 22 letters of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet numbered less than the consonant phonemes of ancient Biblical Hebrew; in particular, the letters <ח, ע, ש> could each mark two different phonemes. After a sound shift the letters ח, ע could only mark one phoneme, but (except in Samaritan Hebrew) ש still marked two. The old Babylonian vocalization system wrote a superscript ס above the ש to indicate it took the value /s/, while the Masoretes added the shin dot to distinguish between the two varieties of the letter.

The original Hebrew alphabet consisted only of consonants, but gradually the letters א, ה, ו, י, also became used to indicate vowels, known as matres lectionis when used in this function. It is thought that this was a product of phonetic development: for instance, *bayt 'house' shifted to בֵּית in construct state but retained its spelling. While no examples of early Hebrew orthography have been found, older Phoenician and Moabite
Moabite language
The Moabite language is an extinct Canaanite language, spoken in Moab in the early first millennium BC. Most of our knowledge about Moabite comes from the Mesha Stele, as well as the El-Kerak Stela. The main features distinguishing Moabite from fellow Canaanite languages such as Hebrew are: a...

 texts show how First Temple period Hebrew would have been written. Phoenician inscriptions from the 10th century BCE do not indicate matres lectiones in the middle or the end of a word, for example לפנ and ז for later לפני and זה, similarly to the Hebrew Gezer Calendar
Gezer calendar
The Gezer calendar is a tablet of soft limestone inscription, dating to the 10th century BCE. Scholars are divided as to whether the script and language are Phoenician or paleo-Hebrew, which were linguistically very similar in this period....

, which has for instance שערמ for שעורים and possibly ירח for . Matres lectionis were later added word-finally, for instance the Mesha inscription has for later ; however at this stage they were not yet used word-medially, compare Siloam inscription
Siloam inscription
The Siloam inscription or Silwan inscription is a passage of inscribed text found in the Hezekiah tunnel which brings water from the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam, located in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. The inscription records the construction of the tunnel in the 8th century...

 זדה versus אש (for later ). The relative terms defective and full/plene are used to refer to alternative spellings of a word with less or more matres lectionis, respectively.Ktiv male
Ktiv male
Ktiv hasar niqqud , are the rules for writing Hebrew without vowel pointers , often replacing them with matres lectionis . To avoid confusion, consonantal ו and י are doubled in the middle of words...

, the Hebrew term for full spelling, has become de rigueur in Modern Hebrew.


The Hebrew Bible was presumably originally written in a more defective orthography than found in any of the texts known today. Of the extant textual witnesses of the Hebrew Bible, the Masoretic text is generally the most conservative in its use of matres lectionis, with the Samaritan Pentateuch
Samaritan Pentateuch
The Samaritan Pentateuch, sometimes called Samaritan Torah, , is a version of the Hebrew language Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, used by the Samaritans....

 and its forebearers being more full and the Qumran tradition showing the most liberal use of vowel letters. The Masoretic text mostly uses vowel letters for long vowels, showing the tendency to mark all long vowels except for word-internal /aː/.There are rare-cases of <א> being used medially as a true vowel letter, e.g. דָּאג for the usual דָּג 'fish'. Most cases, however, of <א> being used as a vowel letter stem from conservative spelling of words which originally contained /ʔ/, e.g. רֹאשׁ 'head' from original */raʔʃ/. See . There are also a number of exceptions to the rule of marking other long vowels, e.g. when the following syllable contains a vowel letters (like in קֹלֹוֹת 'voices' rather than קוֹלוֹת) or when a vowel letter already marks a consonant (so גּוֹיִם 'nations' rather than גּוֹיִים*), and within the Bible there is often little consistency in spelling. See In the Qumran tradition, back vowel
Back vowel
A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...

s are usually represented by whether short or long. is generally used for both long [iː] and [eː] (אבילים, מית), and final [iː] is often written as in analogy to words like היא, הביא, e.g. כיא, sometimes . is found finally in forms like (Tiberian ), (Tiberian ) while <א> may be used for an a-quality vowel in final position (e.g. ) and in medial position (e.g. ). Pre-Samaritan and Samaritan texts show full spellings in many categories (e.g. vs. Masoretic in Genesis 49:3) but only rarely show full spelling of the Qumran type.

In general the vowels of Biblical Hebrew were not indicated in the original text, but various sources attest them at various stages of development. Greek and Latin transcriptions of words from the Biblical text provide early evidence of the nature of Biblical Hebrew vowels. In particular, there is evidence from the rendering of proper nouns in the Koine Greek
Koine Greek
Koine Greek is the universal dialect of the Greek language spoken throughout post-Classical antiquity , developing from the Attic dialect, with admixture of elements especially from Ionic....

 Septuagint (3rd-2nd centuries BCE) and the Greek alphabet transcription
Transcription (linguistics)
Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...

 of the Hebrew Biblical text contained in the Secunda
Secunda (Hexapla)
The Secunda is the second column of Origen's Hexapla, a compilation of the Hebrew bible and Greek versions. It consists of a transliteration of the Hebrew text of the Hebrew Bible into Greek characters, and is the oldest coherent Hebrew text in existence...

 (3rd century CE, likely a copy of a preexisting text from before 100 BCEThe Secunda
Secunda (Hexapla)
The Secunda is the second column of Origen's Hexapla, a compilation of the Hebrew bible and Greek versions. It consists of a transliteration of the Hebrew text of the Hebrew Bible into Greek characters, and is the oldest coherent Hebrew text in existence...

 is a transliteration of the Hebrew Biblical text contained in the Hexapla
Hexapla
Hexapla is the term for an edition of the Bible in six versions. Especially it applies to the edition of the Old Testament compiled by Origen of Alexandria, which placed side by side:#Hebrew...

, a recension of the Old Testament compiled by Origen
Origen
Origen , or Origen Adamantius, 184/5–253/4, was an early Christian Alexandrian scholar and theologian, and one of the most distinguished writers of the early Church. As early as the fourth century, his orthodoxy was suspect, in part because he believed in the pre-existence of souls...

 in the 3rd century CE. There is evidence that the text of the Secunda was written before 100 BCE, despite the later date of the Hexapla. For example, by the time of Origen <η αι> were pronounced [iː ɛː], a merger which had already begun around 100 BCE, while in the Secunda they are used to represent Hebrew /eː aj/. See
). In the 7th and 8th centuries CE various systems of vocalic notation were developed to indicate vowels in the Biblical text. The most prominent, best preserved, and the only system still in use, is the Tiberian vocalization
Tiberian vocalization
The Tiberian vocalization is a system of diacritics devised by the Masoretes to add to the consonantal Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible; this system soon became used to vocalize other texts as well...

 system, created by scholars known as Masoretes around 850 CE. There are also various extant manuscripts making use of less common vocalization systems (Babylonian
Babylonian vocalization
The Babylonian vocalization is a system of diacritics devised by the Masoretes to add to the consonantal Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible to indicate vowel quality, reflecting the Hebrew of Babylon...

 and Palestinian
Palestinian vocalization
The Palestinian vocalization is a system of diacritics devised by the Masoretes to add to the consonantal Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible to indicate vowel quality, reflecting the Hebrew of Palestine...

), known as superlinear vocalizations because their vocalization marks are placed above the letters.The Palestinian system has two main subtypes and shows great variation. The Babylonian vocalization occurred in two main types (simple / einfach and complex / kompliziert), with various subgroups differing as to their affinity with the Tiberian tradition. In the Babylonian and Palestinian systems only the most important vowels were written. See In addition, the Samaritan reading tradition is independent of these systems, and was occasionally notated with a separate vocalization system.Almost all vocalized manuscripts use the Masoretic Text
Masoretic Text
The Masoretic Text is the authoritative Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible and is regarded as Judaism's official version of the Tanakh. While the Masoretic Text defines the books of the Jewish canon, it also defines the precise letter-text of these biblical books, with their vocalization and...

. However there are some vocalized Samaritan manuscripts from the Middle Ages. See
These systems often record vowels at different stages of historical development; for example, the name of the Judge Samson
Samson
Samson, Shimshon ; Shamshoun or Sampson is the third to last of the Judges of the ancient Israelites mentioned in the Tanakh ....

 is recorded in Greek as Σαμψών Sampsōn with the first vowel as /a/, while Tiberian שִמְשוֹן /ʃimʃon/ with /i/ shows the effect of the law of attenuation whereby /a/ in closed unstressed syllables became /i/. All of these systems together are used to reconstruct the original vocalization of Biblical Hebrew.

At an early stage, in documents written in the paleo-Hebrew script, words were divided by short vertical lines and later by dots, as reflected by the Mesha Stone, the Siloam inscription, the Ophel inscription, and paleo-Hebrew script documents from Qumran. Word division was not used in Phoenician inscriptions; however, there is not direct evidence for Biblical texts being written without word division, as suggested by Nahmanides
Nahmanides
Nahmanides, also known as Rabbi Moses ben Naḥman Girondi, Bonastruc ça Porta and by his acronym Ramban, , was a leading medieval Jewish scholar, Catalan rabbi, philosopher, physician, kabbalist, and biblical commentator.-Name:"Nahmanides" is a Greek-influenced formation meaning "son of Naḥman"...

 in his introduction to the Torah. Word division using spaces was commonly used from the beginning of the 7th century BCE for documents in the Aramaic script. In addition to marking vowels, the Tiberian system also uses cantillation
Cantillation
Cantillation is the ritual chanting of readings from the Hebrew Bible in synagogue services. The chants are written and notated in accordance with the special signs or marks printed in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible to complement the letters and vowel points...

 marks, which serve to mark word stress, semantic structure, and the musical motifs used in formal recitation of the text.

While the Tiberian, Babylonian, and Palestinian reading traditions are extinct, various other systems of pronunciation have evolved over time, notably the Yemenite
Yemenite Hebrew language
Yemenite Hebrew , also referred to as Temani Hebrew , is the pronunciation system for Biblical and liturgical Hebrew traditionally used by Yemenite Jews. Yemenite Jews brought their language to Israel through immigration. Their first organized immigration to the region began in 1882.It is believed...

, Sephardi
Sephardi Hebrew language
Sephardi Hebrew is the pronunciation system for Biblical Hebrew favored for liturgical use by Sephardi Jewish practice...

, Ashkenazi
Ashkenazi Hebrew
Ashkenazi Hebrew , is the pronunciation system for Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew favored for liturgical use by Ashkenazi Jewish practice. Its phonology was influenced by languages with which it came into contact, such as Yiddish, German, and various Slavic languages...

, and Samaritan
Samaritan Hebrew language
Samaritan Hebrew , is a reading tradition for Biblical Hebrew as used by the Samaritans for reading the Samaritan Pentateuch. Its pronunciation is highly similar to that of Samaritan Arabic, used by the Samaritans in prayer.-Orthography:...

 traditions. Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew , also known as Israeli Hebrew or Modern Israeli Hebrew, is the language spoken in Israel and in some Jewish communities worldwide, from the early 20th century to the present....

 pronunciation is also used by some to read Biblical texts. The modern reading traditions do not stem solely from the Tiberian system; for instance, the Sephardic tradition's distinction between qamatz gadol and qatan is pre-Tiberian. However, the only orthographic system used to mark vowels is the Tiberian vocalization.

Phonology



The phonology as reconstructed for Biblical Hebrew is as follows:

Consonants


Consonants lost and gained during the lifetime of Biblical Hebrew are color-coded respectively.
Biblical Hebrew consonants
Labial
Labial consonant
Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals...

Dental/
Alveolar
Alveolar consonant
Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...

Post-
alveolar
Postalveolar consonant
Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate...

Palatal
Palatal consonant
Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...

Velar
Velar consonant
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....

/
Uvular
Uvular consonant
Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and...

Pharyn-
geal
Pharyngeal consonant
A pharyngeal consonant is a type of consonant which is articulated with the root of the tongue against the pharynx.-Pharyngeal consonants in the IPA:Pharyngeal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet :...

Glottal
Glottal consonant
Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...

Nasals
Nasal consonant
A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...

m n
Stops
Stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...

voiceless
Voiceless
In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, this is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word "phonation" implies voicing, and that voicelessness is the lack of...

p t k ʔ
voiced
Voice (phonetics)
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate...

b d ɡ
emphatic
Emphatic consonant
Emphatic consonant is a term widely used in Semitic linguistics to describe one of a series of obstruent consonants which originally contrasted with series of both voiced and voiceless obstruents. In specific Semitic languages, the members of this series may be realized as pharyngealized,...

kʼ/q
Fricatives
Fricative consonant
Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...

voiceless
Voiceless
In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, this is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word "phonation" implies voicing, and that voicelessness is the lack of...

(f) (θ) s ɬ ʃ (x) χ ħ h
voiced
Voice (phonetics)
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate...

(v) (ð) z (ɣ) ʁ ʕ
emphatic
Emphatic consonant
Emphatic consonant is a term widely used in Semitic linguistics to describe one of a series of obstruent consonants which originally contrasted with series of both voiced and voiceless obstruents. In specific Semitic languages, the members of this series may be realized as pharyngealized,...

Approximants
Approximant consonant
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...

w l j
Trill
Trill consonant
In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. Standard Spanish <rr> as in perro is an alveolar trill, while in Parisian French it is almost always uvular....

r

The phonetic nature of some Biblical Hebrew consonants is disputed. The so called "emphatics" were likely ejective, but possibly pharyngealized or velarized. Some argue that /s, z, sʼ/ were affricated (/ts, dz, tsʼ/).

Originally, the Hebrew letters ח and ע each had two possible phonemes, uvular and pharyngeal, unmarked in Hebrew orthography. However the uvular phonemes /χ/ ח and /ʁ/ ע merged with their pharyngeal ones /ħ/ ח and /ʕ/ ע respectively c. 200 BCE. This is observed by noting that these phonemes are distinguished consistently in the Septuagint of the Pentateuch (e.g. Isaac
Isaac
Isaac as described in the Hebrew Bible, was the only son Abraham had with his wife Sarah, and was the father of Jacob and Esau. Isaac was one of the three patriarchs of the Israelites...

  = versus Rachel
Rachel
Rachel , as described in the Hebrew Bible, is a prophet and the favorite wife of Jacob, one of the three Biblical Patriarchs, and mother of Joseph and Benjamin. She was the daughter of Laban and the younger sister of Leah, Jacob's first wife...

  = ), but this becomes more sporadic in later books and is generally absent in Ezra and Nehemiah. The phoneme /ɬ/, also unmarked by Hebrew orthography, is attested by internal and comparative evidence; in particular it is preserved as a lateral fricative in Modern South Arabian dialects. /ɬ/ began merging with /s/ in Late Biblical Hebrew, as indicated by interchange of orthographic ⟨ש⟩ and ⟨ס⟩, possibly under the influence of Aramaic, and this became the rule in Mishnaic Hebrew. In all Jewish reading traditions /ɬ/ and /s/ have merged completely; however in Samaritan Hebrew /ɬ/ has instead merged with /ʃ/.

Allophonic spirantization of /b ɡ d k p t/ to [v ɣ ð x f θ] (known as begadkefat
Begadkefat
Begadkefat is the name given to a phenomenon of spirantization affecting most plosive consonants of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic when they are preceded by a vowel and not geminated...

 spirantization) developed sometime during the lifetime of Biblical Hebrew under the influence of Aramaic.Or perhaps Hurrian
Hurrian language
Hurrian is a conventional name for the language of the Hurrians , a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly vanished by 1000 BC. Hurrian was the language of the Mitanni kingdom in northern Mesopotamia, and was likely spoken at least initially in Hurrian settlements in...

, but this is unlikely See .
This probably happened after the original Old Aramaic phonemes /θ, ð/ disappeared in the 7th century BCE, and most likely occurred after the loss of Hebrew /χ, ʁ/ c. 200 BCE.According to the generally accepted view, it is unlikely begadkefat spirantization occurred before the merger of /χ, ʁ/ and /ħ, ʕ/, or else [x, χ] and [ɣ, ʁ] would have to be contrastive, which is cross-linguistically rare. However Blau argues that it is possible that lenited /k/ and /χ/ could coexist even if pronounced identically, since one would be recognized as an alternating allophone (as apparently is the case in Nestorian Syriac). See . It is known to have occurred in Hebrew by the 2nd century CE. After a certain point this alternation became contrastive in word-medial and final position (though bearing low functional load
Functional load
In linguistics and especially phonology, functional load refers to the importance of certain features in making distinctions in a language...

), but in word-initial position they remained allophonic.

The Dead Sea scrolls show evidence of confusion of the phonemes /ħ ʕ h ʔ/, e.g. חמר ħmr for Masoretic אָמַר /ʔɔˈmar/ 'he said'. However the testimony of Jerome indicates that this was a regionalism and not universal. Confusion of gutturals was also attested in later Mishnaic Hebrew and Aramaic (see Eruvin 53b). In Samaritan Hebrew, /ʔ ħ h ʕ/ have generally all merged, either into /ʔ/, a glide /w/ or /j/, or by vanishing completely (often creating a long vowel), except that original /ʕ ħ/ sometimes have reflex /ʕ/ before /a ɒ/.

Geminate consonants are phonemically contrastive in Biblical Hebrew. In the Secunda /w j z/ are never geminate. In the Tiberian tradition /ħ ʕ h ʔ r/ cannot be geminate; historically first /r ʔ/ degeminated, followed by /ʕ/, /h/, and finally /ħ/, as evidenced by changes in the quality of the preceding vowel.The vowel before originally geminate /r ʔ/ usually shows compensatory lengthening, e.g. הָאָב /hɔˈʔɔv/ 'the father' < /*haʔːab/; with /ʕ/ preceding /*i/ tends to remain short; with /h/ original /*a/ also remains short, and /ħ/ generally does not cause compensatory lengthening, e.g. יְרַחֵם 'he will have compassion'. See

Vowels


The vowel system of Biblical Hebrew has changed considerably over time. The following vowels are those reconstructed for the earliest stage of Hebrew, those attested by the Secunda, those of the various vocalization traditions (Tiberian
Tiberian vocalization
The Tiberian vocalization is a system of diacritics devised by the Masoretes to add to the consonantal Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible; this system soon became used to vocalize other texts as well...

 and varieties of Babylonian
Babylonian vocalization
The Babylonian vocalization is a system of diacritics devised by the Masoretes to add to the consonantal Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible to indicate vowel quality, reflecting the Hebrew of Babylon...

 and Palestinian
Palestinian vocalization
The Palestinian vocalization is a system of diacritics devised by the Masoretes to add to the consonantal Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible to indicate vowel quality, reflecting the Hebrew of Palestine...

), and those of the Samaritan tradition, with vowels absent in some traditions color-coded
Proto-Hebrew Secunda Hebrew Tiberian, Babylonian, and Palestinian Hebrew Samaritan Hebrew
Front
Front vowel
A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...

Back
Back vowel
A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...

Close
Close vowel
A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the...

i iː u uː
Close-mid
Close-mid vowel
A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel...

(eː)
Open
Open vowel
An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue...

a aː
Front
Front vowel
A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...

Back
Back vowel
A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...

Close
Close vowel
A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the...

Close-mid
Close-mid vowel
A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel...

e eː o oː
Open
Open vowel
An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue...

a1
Reduced ə
ass="wikitable"> Front
Front vowel
A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...

Back
Back vowel
A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...

Close
Close vowel
A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the...

i u
Close-mid
Close-mid vowel
A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel...

e o
Open-mid
Open-mid vowel
An open-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from an open vowel to a mid vowel...

ɛ1 ɔ2
Open
Open vowel
An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue...

a
Reduced ă3 ɔ̆3 (ɛ̆)3
ə3
Front
Front vowel
A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...

Back
Back vowel
A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...

Close
Close vowel
A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the...

i iː u uː
Mid
Mid vowel
A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel...

e eː (o)1
Open
Open vowel
An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue...

a aː ɒ ɒː
Reduced (ə)2
  1. possibly pronounced [æ], as the orthography alternates <α> and <ε>
  2. merges with /e/ in the Palestinian tradition and with /a/ in the Babylonian traditionWhile the vowels /a e i ɔ o u/ certainly have phonemic status in the Tiberian tradition, /ɛ/ has phonemic value in final stressed position but in other positions it may reflect loss of the opposition /a : i/. See
  3. merges with /a/ or /o/ in the Palestinian tradition
  4. The Tiberian tradition has the reduced vowel phonemes /ă ɔ̆/ and marginal /ɛ̆/, while Palestinian and Babylonian have one, /ə/
  5. /u/ and /o/ only contrast in open post-tonic syllables, e.g. ידו /jedu/ 'his hand' ידיו /jedo/ 'his hands', where /o/ stems from a contracted diphthong. In other environments, /o/ appears in closed syllables and /u/ in open syllables, e.g. דור /dor/ דורות /durot/.
  6. results from both /i/ and /e/ in closed post-tonic syllables


Proto-Semitic likely had a vowel system with three qualities and two lengths, i.e. */a aː i iː u uː/, where the long vowels only occurred in open syllables. Later, final unstressed short vowels dropped out in some words, making it possible for long vowels to occur in closed syllables. Hebrew shows the Canaanite shift
Canaanite shift
In historical linguistics, the Canaanite shift is a sound change that took place in the Canaanite dialects, which belong to the Northwest Semitic branch of the Semitic languages family. This sound change caused Proto-NW-Semitic *ā to turn into ō in Proto-Canaanite...

 whereby */aː/ often shifted to /oː/); the conditions of this shift are disputed.In fact, its scope of application is different in Samaritan and Tiberian Hebrew (e.g. פה 'here' Tiberian /po/ vs. Samaritan /fa/), see . Even in Tiberian Hebrew doublets are found, e.g. /kʼanːo(ʔ?)/ = /kʼanːɔ(ʔ?)/ 'zealous'. See This shift had occurred by the 14th century BCE, as demonstrated by its presence in the Amarna letters
Amarna letters
The Amarna letters are an archive of correspondence on clay tablets, mostly diplomatic, between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru during the New Kingdom...

 (c. 1365 BCE). The Proto-Hebrew vowel system is thus reconstructed as */a aː oː i iː u uː/ (and possibly rare */eː/).

Proto-Hebrew long vowels usually retain their vowel quality in the later traditions of Hebrew, while the Proto-Hebrew short vowels */a i u/ undergo many shifts. Generally these vowels either were lengthened, reduced, or preserved, depending on environment, and these changes also affected the vowel quality. Short vowels tended to be lengthened in open syllables and reduced in the second syllable before the stress. In Tiberian Hebrew, short vowels in pretonic open syllables are sometimes reduced instead: It does not occur for /*a/, but is occasional for /*i/ (e.g. מסמְרים 'nails' < */masmiriːm/), and is common for /*u/ (e.g. רְחוֹב 'open place' < */ruħaːb/). Samaritan and Qumran Hebrew do not have reduced vowels. Sometimes pretonic gemination is used to preserve such a vowel: this is particularly common in Tiberian Hebrew with pretonic /*u/, e.g. אדֻמּים 'red (pl.)'. Pretonic gemination is also found in Samaritan Hebrew, but not always in the same locations as in Tiberian Hebrew, e.g. גמלים TH /ɡămalːim/ SH /ɡɒmɒləm/; שלמים TH /ʃălɔmim/ SH /ʃelamːəm/. Final short vowels were dropped.

By the Tiberian time vowel length had become allophonic, but vowels that become allophonically long at a late stage do not show the earlier shifts in vowel quality, for example [aː] in ירחם had not become [ɔː] unlike earlier long [aː]. Samaritan Hebrew also does not reflect etymological vowel length; however the elision of guttural consonants has created new phonemic vowel length, e.g. /rɒb/ רב 'great' vs. /rɒːb/ רחב 'wide'.

In the Secunda, */a i u/ are lengthened to /aː eː oː/, reduced to /ə/, and preserved as /a e o/. In the Tiberian and Babylonian systems, lengthened */a i u/ become /ɔ e o/, while in the Palestinian system they become /a e o/. The Babylonian and Palestinian systems have only one reduced vowel phoneme /ə/ like the Secunda. The Tiberian tradition possesses three reduced vowels /ă ɔ̆ ɛ̆/ of which /ɛ̆/ has questionable phonemicity.See אֳנִי /ɔ̆ni/ 'ships' אֲנִי /ăni/ 'I', חֳלִי /ħɔ̆li/ 'sickness' חֲלִי /ħăli/ 'ornament', עֲלִי /ʕăli/ 'ascend!' (Num 21:17) and בַּעֱלִי /baʕɛ̆li/ '(with the) pestle' (Prov 27:22). /ɛ̆/ alternates with /ă/ frequently and rarely contrasts with it, e.g. אֱדוֹם /ʔɛ̆ðom/ 'Edom
Edom
Edom or Idumea was a historical region of the Southern Levant located south of Judea and the Dead Sea. It is mentioned in biblical records as a 1st millennium BC Iron Age kingdom of Edom, and in classical antiquity the cognate name Idumea was used to refer to a smaller area in the same region...

' versus אֲדֹמִי /ʔăðomi/ 'Edomite'. /ɔ̆/ is clearly phonemic but bears minimal functional load
Functional load
In linguistics and especially phonology, functional load refers to the importance of certain features in making distinctions in a language...

. /ă/ is written both with mobile šwa <ְ> and hataf patah <ֲ>.
When reduced, etymological */a i u/ become /ă ɛ̆~ă ɔ̆/ under gutturals (e.g. אֲמרתם 'you (mp.) said" cf. אָמר 'he said'), and generally /ă/ under non-gutturals, but */u/ > /ɔ̆/ (and rarely */i/ > /ɛ̆/) may still occur, especially after stops (or their spirantized counterparts) and /sʼ ʃ/ (e.g. דֳּמִי /dɔ̆mi/). /ă/ under a non-guttural letter was pronounced as an ultrashort copy of the following vowel before a guttural, e.g. וּבָקְעָה [uvɔqɔ̆ˈʕɔ], and as [ĭ] preceding /j/, e.g. תְדֵמְּיוּ֫נִי [θăðamːĭˈjuni], but was always pronounced as [ă] under gutturals, e.g. . In other syllables, */i u/ are preserved as /ɛ~i ɔ~u/ (Tiberian) /a~i u/ (Babylonian) /e~i o~u/ (Palestinian) – generally becoming the second vowel before geminates (e.g. לִבִּי) and the first otherwise.The Palestinian correlates of Tiberian /ɔ/ (/a/ and /o/) thus reflect the qamatz gadol-qamatz qatan distinction.

Various more specific conditioned shifts of vowel quality have also occurred. For example, in some traditions the short vowel /*a/ tended to shift to /i/ in unstressed closed syllables: this is known as the law of attenuation. It is common in the Tiberian tradition, e.g. */ʃabʕat/ > Tiberian שִבְעָה /ʃivˈʕɔ/ 'seven', but exceptions are frequent. It is less common in the Babylonian vocalization, e.g. /ʃabʕɔ/ 'seven', and differences in Greek and Latin transcriptions demonstrate that it began quite late. Attenuation generally did not occur before /i~e/, e.g. Tiberian מַפְתֵחַ /mafˈteaħ/ 'key' versus מִפְתַח /mifˈtaħ/ 'opening (construct)', and often was blocked before a geminate, e.g. מתנה 'gift'. Attenuation is rarely present in Samaritan Hebrew, e.g. מקדש /maqdaʃ/.Verbal forms such as יפקד = Samaritan /jifqɒd/ < */jafqud/ may be examples of Barth's law rather than attenuation.

Stress


Proto-Hebrew generally had penultimate stress. For the purposes of vowel quality shifts, words in the construct state are treated as if the stress fell immediately on the first syllable following the word. See The ultimate stress of later traditions of Hebrew usually resulted from the loss of final vowels in many words, preserving the location of proto-Semitic stress.Additionally, short stressed vowels in open syllables were reduced and lost stress, leading to ultimate stress in forms like קטלו < */qaˈtʼaluː/. In Tiberian Hebrew some words have penultimate stress in pause (before a break in reading), but ultimate stress in context, such as שָמָ֫רָה and שָמְרָה 'she watched', because the penultimate vowel in the original form */ʃaˈmaru/ lengthened in pause, while in context it was not lengthened, and then lost the stress and was reduced due to this sound shift. See Tiberian Hebrew has phonemic stress, e.g. בָּנוּ֫ /bɔˈnu/ 'they built' vs. בָּ֫נוּ /ˈbɔnu/ 'in us'; stress is most commonly ultimate, less commonly penultimate, and antipenultimate stress exists marginally, e.g. הָאֹ֫הֱלָה /hɔˈʔohɛ̆lɔ/ 'into the tent'.In fact, it is not clear that a reduced vowel should be considered as comprising a whole syllable. Note for example that the rule whereby a word's stress shifts to a preceding open syllable to avoid being adjacent to another stressed syllable skips over ultrashort vowels, e.g. עִם־יוֹ֫רְדֵי בוֹר /ʕim-ˈjorăde vor/ 'with those who go down into the pit' מְטֹ֫עֲנֵי חָ֫רֶב /măˈtʼoʕăne ˈħɔrɛv/ 'pierced with a sword'. See There does not seem to be evidence for stress in the Secunda varying from that of the Tiberian tradition. Despite sharing the loss of final vowels with Tiberian Hebrew, Samaritan Hebrew has generally not preserved Proto-Semitic stress, and has predominantly penultimate stress, with occasional ultimate stress. There is evidence that Qumran Hebrew had a similar stress pattern to Samaritan Hebrew.

Grammar


Medieval grammarians of Arabic and Hebrew classified words as belonging to three parts of speech: Arabic ism 'name; noun', fiʻl 'act; verb', and ḥarf 'motion; particle'; other grammarians have included more categories. In particular, adjectives and nouns show more affinity to each other than in most European languages. Biblical Hebrew has a typical Semitic
Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...

 morphology, characterized by the use of roots. Most words in Biblical Hebrew are formed from a root, a sequence of consonants with a general associated meaning. Roots are usually triconsonantal, with biconsonantal roots less common (depending on how some words are analyzed) and rare cases of quadri- and quinqiconsonantal roots. Roots are modified by affix
Affix
An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...

ation to form words. Verbal patterns are more productive and consistent, while noun patterns are less predictable.

Nouns and adjectives


The most common nominal prefix used is /m/, used for substantives of location (מושב 'assembly'), instruments (מפתח 'key'), and abstractions (משפט 'judgement'). The vowel after /m/ is normally /a/, but appears sometimes as /i/, or in the case of מושב as /o/ (contracted from */aw/). The prefix /t/ is used to denote the action of the verb it is derived from, more common for initial-/w/ verbs, e.g. תודה 'thanksgiving' (< ydy). Prefixed /ʔ/ is used in adjectives, e.g. אכזב 'deceptive', and also occurs in nouns with initial sibilants, e.g. אצבע 'finger'. In the latter case this prefix was added for phonetic reasons, and the א prefix is called either 'prothetic' or 'prosthetic'. Prefixed ע /ʕ/ occurs perhaps as a mark of forcefulness, e.g. גננ 'to cover' vs. עגנ 'to shut oneself off, אגמ 'to be sad' vs. עגמ 'to grieve', and often occurs in quadriliteral animal names, perhaps as a prefix, e.g. עֳטלף 'bat', עכבר 'mouse', עקרב 'scorpion'.

In proto-Semitic nouns were marked for case: in the singular the markers were */-u/ in the nominative
Nominative case
The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...

, */-a/ in the accusative
Accusative case
The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...

 (used also for adverbials), and */-i/ in the genitive
Genitive case
In grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...

, as evidenced in Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Arabic. The Amarna letters
Amarna letters
The Amarna letters are an archive of correspondence on clay tablets, mostly diplomatic, between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru during the New Kingdom...

 show that this was probably still present in Hebrew c. 1350 BCE. In the development of Hebrew, final */-u, -i/ were dropped first, and later */-a/ was elided as well. Mimation
Mimation
Mimation refers to the suffixed   which occurs in some Semitic languages.This occurs in Akkadian on singular nouns. It was also present in proto-Semitic....

, a nominal suffix */-m/ of unclear meaning, was found in early Canaanite, as shown by early Egyptian transcriptions (c. 1800 BCE) of Jerusalem as Urušalimim, but there is no indication of its presence after 1800 BCE.It has been suggested that the construct forms אבי, אחי have long /iː/ lacking in the absolute אב אח because the later stem from forms like */ʔabuːm/ > */ʔabum/ (because Proto-Semitic did not allow long vowels in closed syllables) > */ʔab/ (loss of mimation and final short vowel), see Final */-a/ is preserved in לַ֫יְלָה /ˈlajlɔ/, originally meaning 'at night' but in prose replacing לַ֫יִל /ˈlajil/ 'night', and in the "connective vowels' of some prepositions (originally adverbials), e.g. עִמָּ֫נוּ 'with us'; nouns preserve */-i/ in forms like .The unstressed suffix -ה in words like ארצה 'to the earth', occurring also in exclamations like חללה and used ornamentally in poetry, e.g. ישועתה, may have originally terminated in consonantal */-h/ which was later elided, following the suffix */-a/. This is evidenced by Ugaritic orthography, almost purely consonantal, where ארצה appears with /h/, see Construct state nouns lost case vowels at an early period (similar to Akkadian), as shown by the reflexes of */ɬadaju/ (שָֹדֶה in absolute but שְׂדֵה in construct) and the reflexes of */jadu/ ( and ) However forms like יָדֵ֫נוּ show that this was not yet a feature of Proto-Hebrew.

Biblical Hebrew has two genders, masculine and feminine, which are reflected in nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs. Hebrew distinguishes between singular and plural numbers, and plural forms may also be used for collectives and honorifics. Hebrew has a morphological dual form for nouns that naturally occur in pairs, and for units of measurement and time this contrasts with the plural (יום 'day' יומים 'two days' ימים 'days'). However adjectives, pronouns, and verbs do not have dual forms, and most nominal dual forms can function as plurals (שש כנפַים 'six wings' from Isaiah 6:2). Finite verbs are marked for subject person, number, and gender. Nouns also have a construct
Status constructus
The construct state or status constructus is a noun form occurring in Afro-Asiatic languages. It is particularly common in Semitic languages , Berber languages, and in the extinct Egyptian language...

 form which is used in genitive constructions.

Nouns are marked as definite
Definiteness
In grammatical theory, definiteness is a feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between entities which are specific and identifiable in a given context and entities which are not ....

 with the prefix /ha-/ followed by gemination of the initial consonant of the noun. In Tiberian Hebrew the vowel of the article may become /ɛ/ or /ɔ/ in certain phonetic environments, for example החכם /hɛħɔˈxɔm/ 'the wise man', האיש /hɔˈʔiʃ/ 'the man'.

The traditions differ on the form of segolate
Segolate
Segolates are words in the Hebrew language whose end is of the form CVCVC, where the penultimate vowel receives syllable stress. Such words are called "segolates" because the final unstressed vowel is typically segol...

 nouns, nouns stemming from roots with two final consonants. The anaptyctic /ɛ/ of the Tiberian tradition in segolates appears in the Septuagint (3rd century BCE) but not the Hexapla (2nd century CE), e.g. גֶּתֶר /ˈɡɛθɛr/ = Γαθερ versus כֵּסֶל /ˈkesɛl/ = Χεσλ (Psalms 49:14). This may reflect dialectual variation or phonetic versus phonemic transcriptions. Both the Palestinian and Babylonian traditions have an anaptyctic vowel in segolates, /e/ in the Palestinian tradition (e.g. /ʔeresʼ/ 'land' = Tiberian אֶרֶץ Deuteronomy 26:15) and /a/ in Babylonian (e.g. /ħepasʼ/ 'item' = Tiberian חֵפֶץ Jeremiah 22:28). The Qumran tradition sometimes shows some type of back epenthetic vowel when the first vowel is back, e.g. <אוהול> for Tiberian <אֹהֶל> /ˈʔohɛl/ 'tent'.

Biblical Hebrew has two sets of personal pronouns: the free-standing independent pronouns have a nominative function, while the pronominal suffixes are genitive or accusative. Only the first person suffix has different possessive and objective forms ( and ).

Verbs


Verbal consonantal roots are placed into verbal conjugations patterns, known as בנינים binyanim in Hebrew; the binyanim mainly serve to indicate grammatical voice
Voice (grammar)
In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments . When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice...

. This includes various distinctions of reflexivity, passivity, and causativity. Verbs of all binyanim have three non-finite forms (one participle, two infinitives), three modal forms (cohortative, imperative
Imperative mood
The imperative mood expresses commands or requests as a grammatical mood. These commands or requests urge the audience to act a certain way. It also may signal a prohibition, permission, or any other kind of exhortation.- Morphology :...

, jussive
Jussive mood
The jussive is a grammatical mood of verbs for issuing orders, commanding, or exhorting . English verbs are not marked for this mood...

), and two major conjugations (prefixing, suffixing).The modal forms may be taken to form a single volitional class, as cohortative is used in first person, imperative (or prefixing) in second person positive, jussive (or prefixing) in second person negative, and jussive in third person. They also overlap semantically, for example a jussive form like 'May my soul ...' is semantically equivalent to a cohortative like 'May I ...'. However, the three moods stem from different classes in proto-West-Semitic. As preserved in Classical Arabic, there were originally three prefix tenses, indicative yaqtulu, jussive qatul, and subjunctive yaqtula, which existed for every person. In Biblical Hebrew, yaqtulu developed into the prefixing class, while yaqtulu became the jussive and yaqtula the cohortative. It should also be noted that for most roots in Biblical Hebrew, the jussive form is identical to the indicative form. (Differentiation is typical of forms with 'long' and 'short' forms, e.g. indicative יכרִית, jussive יכרֵת; indicative יראה, jussive יֵרֶא) See and . The meaning of the prefixing and suffixing conjugations are also affected by the conjugation ו, and their meaning with respect to tense
Grammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...

 and aspect
Grammatical aspect
In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...

 is a matter of debate.

Word order


The default word order in Biblical Hebrew is VSO. Attributive adjectives normally follow the noun they modify. In Biblical Hebrew, possession is normally expressed with status constructus
Status constructus
The construct state or status constructus is a noun form occurring in Afro-Asiatic languages. It is particularly common in Semitic languages , Berber languages, and in the extinct Egyptian language...

, a construction in which the possessed noun occurs in a phonologically reduced, "construct" form and is followed by the possessor noun in its normal, "absolute" form. Pronominal direct objects are either suffixed to the verb or alternatively expressed on the object-marking pronoun .

Sample text


The following is a sample from Psalm 18
Psalm 18
-Judaism:*Is recited on the seventh day of Passover in some traditions.*Verse 32 is recited before Ein Keloheinu.*Verse 51 is part of the weekday version of Birkat Hamazon....

 as appears in the Masoretic text with medieval Tiberian niqqud and cantillation and the Greek transcription of the Secunda of the Hexapla along with its reconstructed pronunciation.


29 כִּֽי־אַ֭תָּה תָּאִ֣יר נֵרִ֑י יְהוָ֥ה אֱ֝לֹהַ֗י יַגִּ֥יהַּ חָשְׁכִּֽי׃

30 כִּֽי־בְ֭ךָ אָרֻ֣ץ גְּד֑וּד וּ֝בֵֽאלֹהַ֗י אֲדַלֶּג־שֽׁוּר׃

31 הָאֵל֮ תָּמִ֪ים דַּ֫רְכֹּ֥ו אִמְרַֽת־יְהוָ֥ה צְרוּפָ֑ה מָגֵ֥ן ה֝֗וּא לְכֹ֤ל ׀ הַחֹסִ֬ים בֹּֽו׃

32 כִּ֤י מִ֣י אֱ֭לֹוהַּ מִבַּלְעֲדֵ֣י יְהוָ֑ה וּמִ֥י צ֝֗וּר זוּלָתִ֥י אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ׃
Secunda







Pronunciation (Secunda) (IPA
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...

)

29. [kiː ʔatːaː taːʔiːr neːriː etragrammaton

30. [kiː baːk ʔaːruːsʼ ɡəduːd wəbaloːhaj ʔadːalːeɡ ʃuːr]

31. [haːʔeːl tamːiːm darkoː ʔemərat etragrammaton

32. [kiː miː ʔaloːh mebːalʕadeː etragrammaton

External links


  • Biblical Hebrew Resources
    • Resources for the Study of Biblical Hebrew, Prof. E. Ben Zvi, University of Alberta
      University of Alberta
      The University of Alberta is a public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford, the first premier of Alberta and Henry Marshall Tory, its first president, it is widely recognized as one of the best universities in Canada...

    • Brown–Driver–Briggs Hebrew Lexicon – with an appendix containg the Biblical Aramaic (Wikisource)