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127-481: Shechem ( / ˈ ʃ ɛ k ə m / SHEK -əm ; Hebrew : שְׁכֶם , romanized :  Šəḵem ; Samaritan Hebrew : ࠔࠬࠥࠊࠝࠌ , romanized:  Šăkēm ), also spelled Sichem ( / ˈ s ɪ k ə m / SIK -əm ; Ancient Greek : Συχέμ , romanized :  Sykhém ) was an ancient city in the southern Levant . Mentioned as a Canaanite city in the Amarna Letters , it later appears in

254-685: A Hebrew form. Medieval Hebrew added 6421 words to (Modern) Hebrew. The approximate number of new lexical items in Israeli is 17,000 (cf. 14,762 in Even-Shoshan 1970 [...]). With the inclusion of foreign and technical terms [...], the total number of Israeli words, including words of biblical, rabbinic and medieval descent, is more than 60,000. In Israel, Modern Hebrew is currently taught in institutions called Ulpanim (singular: Ulpan). There are government-owned, as well as private, Ulpanim offering online courses and face-to-face programs. Modern Hebrew

381-595: A century ago, was fluent enough in this idiom to be able to follow the Mishna Berurah without any trouble." Hebrew has been revived several times as a literary language, most significantly by the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement of early and mid-19th-century Germany. In the early 19th century, a form of spoken Hebrew had emerged in the markets of Jerusalem between Jews of different linguistic backgrounds to communicate for commercial purposes. This Hebrew dialect

508-661: A corollary Hebrew ceased to function as a spoken language around the same time. Moshe Zvi Segal , Joseph Klausner and Ben Yehuda are notable exceptions to this view. During the latter half of the 20th century, accumulating archaeological evidence and especially linguistic analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls has disproven that view. The Dead Sea Scrolls, uncovered in 1946–1948 near Qumran revealed ancient Jewish texts overwhelmingly in Hebrew, not Aramaic. The Qumran scrolls indicate that Hebrew texts were readily understandable to

635-579: A distinct style of philosophical Hebrew. This is used in the translations made by the Ibn Tibbon family. (Original Jewish philosophical works were usually written in Arabic. ) Another important influence was Maimonides , who developed a simple style based on Mishnaic Hebrew for use in his law code, the Mishneh Torah . Subsequent rabbinic literature is written in a blend between this style and

762-594: A gradually accepted movement. It was not, however, until the 1904–1914 Second Aliyah that Hebrew had caught real momentum in Ottoman Palestine with the more highly organized enterprises set forth by the new group of immigrants. When the British Mandate of Palestine recognized Hebrew as one of the country's three official languages (English, Arabic, and Hebrew, in 1922), its new formal status contributed to its diffusion. A constructed modern language with

889-468: A literary language down through the Byzantine period from the 4th century CE. The exact roles of Aramaic and Hebrew remain hotly debated. A trilingual scenario has been proposed for the land of Israel. Hebrew functioned as the local mother tongue with powerful ties to Israel's history, origins and golden age and as the language of Israel's religion; Aramaic functioned as the international language with

1016-649: A memorial stone "under the oak that was by" in Shechem. The oak is associated with the Oak of Moreh where Abram had set up camp during his travels in this area. Shechem and its surrounding lands were given as a Levitical city to the Kohathites . Owing to its central position, no less than to the presence in the neighborhood of places hallowed by the memory of Abraham (Genesis 12:6, 7; 34:5), Jacob's Well (Genesis 33:18–19; 34:2, etc.), and Joseph's tomb (Joshua 24:32),

1143-539: A military leader and nomad native of the wild steppe-lands. In the Old Babylonian tradition, Šaggāšu is a ghost-murderer of the steppe. As stated above, the research defined "dust" or "dirt" as the most probable meaning of Apiru. The wandering Apiru, Rainey suggested, had to "hit the road," thus they were covered with dust and were called dusty. But this is a hypothetical suggestion not found in primary sources. The sources attested another meaning. In Sumerian there

1270-742: A modern version of the ancient language was led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda . Modern Hebrew ( Ivrit ) became the main language of the Yishuv in Palestine , and subsequently the official language of the State of Israel . Estimates of worldwide usage include five million speakers in 1998, and over nine million people in 2013. After Israel, the United States has the largest Hebrew-speaking population, with approximately 220,000 fluent speakers (see Israeli Americans and Jewish Americans ). Modern Hebrew

1397-636: A schismatic temple was then erected on Mount Garizim and thus Shechem became the "holy city" of the Samaritans . The latter, who were left unmolested while the orthodox Jews were chafing under the heavy hand of Antiochus IV ( Antiquities , XII, v, 5, see also Antinomianism in the Books of the Maccabees ) and welcomed with open arms every renegade who came to them from Jerusalem (Antiq., XI, viii, 7), fell about 128 BC before John Hyrcanus , and their temple

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1524-548: A set of dialects evolving out of Late Biblical Hebrew and into Mishnaic Hebrew, thus including elements from both but remaining distinct from either. By the start of the Byzantine Period in the 4th century CE, Classical Hebrew ceased as a regularly spoken language, roughly a century after the publication of the Mishnah, apparently declining since the aftermath of the catastrophic Bar Kokhba revolt around 135 CE. In

1651-588: A social category. For some scholars, however, the passage is confirmation rather than exception. Here Abram appears as a leader of host in a military alliance. He pursues and smites his enemy. The passage presents a warrior Abram, with a rather different character from that of Genesis other episodes, in which Abram is never a warrior. This associates with Apiru too. In the earliest Mesopotamian texts mentioning Apiru they appear as military contingents, auxiliaries, or bands of raiders. Babylonian and Mari tablets mention them particularly as military auxiliaries. Elsewhere in

1778-678: A social class found in every ancient Near Eastern society but in the texts that describe the early periods of the Patriarchs and the Exodus the term Hebrew refers to a broad group of people in the Levant (like the Apiru), among whom the Israelites were a part. Joseph Blenkinsopp makes one exception: Except for its first appearance (Gen. 14:13), the biblical word "Hebrew", can be interpreted as

1905-668: A spoken language, it continued to be used as a lingua franca among scholars and Jews traveling in foreign countries. After the 2nd century CE when the Roman Empire exiled most of the Jewish population of Jerusalem following the Bar Kokhba revolt , they adapted to the societies in which they found themselves, yet letters, contracts, commerce, science, philosophy, medicine, poetry and laws continued to be written mostly in Hebrew, which adapted by borrowing and inventing terms. After

2032-472: A truly Semitic vocabulary and written appearance, although often European in phonology , was to take its place among the current languages of the nations. While many saw his work as fanciful or even blasphemous (because Hebrew was the holy language of the Torah and therefore some thought that it should not be used to discuss everyday matters), many soon understood the need for a common language amongst Jews of

2159-558: A vernacular in Judea until it was displaced by Aramaic, probably in the 3rd century CE. Certain Sadducee , Pharisee , Scribe , Hermit, Zealot and Priest classes maintained an insistence on Hebrew, and all Jews maintained their identity with Hebrew songs and simple quotations from Hebrew texts. While there is no doubt that at a certain point, Hebrew was displaced as the everyday spoken language of most Jews, and that its chief successor in

2286-551: A very substantial Canaanite settlement, and was attacked by Egypt, as mentioned in the Sebek-khu Stele , an Egyptian stele of a noble at the court of Senusret III (c. 1880–1840 BCE). Fortifications were made in the MB IIB (XX-XIX). In the Amarna Letters of about 1350 BCE, Šakmu (i.e., Shechem) was the center of a kingdom carved out by Labaya (or Labayu), a Canaanite warlord who recruited mercenaries from among

2413-499: Is "šagašu" (barbarian), but an Akkadian gloss to an Akkadian word seems odd, and the meaning of "šagašu" doesn't fit the essence of the Ḫabiru. Therefore, the meaning of SA.GAZ should probably be found in West Semitic word such Aramaic ŠGŠ which means muddy, restless, while the word "ḫabatu" should be interpreted as "nomad", and that fits the meaning of the word Ḫabiru/ʿApiru. In the time of Rim-Sin I (1822 BCE to 1763 BCE),

2540-616: Is 1 km (0.62 mi) from Jacob's Well, which they think is not close enough for the women of Sychar to have fetched their water there. Based on John 4:15, these scholars have argued that Shechem is the Samaritan city of Sychar described in the Gospel of John. Some of the inhabitants of Sychar were "Samaritans" who believed in Jesus when he tarried two days in the neighborhood ( John 4 ). Sychar and/or Shechem city must have been visited by

2667-518: Is 8198, of which some 2000 are hapax legomena (the number of Biblical Hebrew roots, on which many of these words are based, is 2099). The number of attested Rabbinic Hebrew words is less than 20,000, of which (i) 7879 are Rabbinic par excellence, i.e. they did not appear in the Old Testament (the number of new Rabbinic Hebrew roots is 805); (ii) around 6000 are a subset of Biblical Hebrew; and (iii) several thousand are Aramaic words which can have

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2794-519: Is almost invariably identified with, or located close to, the town of Flavia Neapolis ( Nablus ). Shechem was a very ancient commercial center due to its position in the middle of vital trade routes through the region. A very old " Way of the Patriarchs " trade route runs in the north–south direction. The oldest settlement in Shechem goes back to about five thousand years ago, during the Chalcolithic period (3500-3000 BCE). At that time agriculture

2921-484: Is based on nisba (like מִצְרִי – Egyptian). Moreover, Meredith Kline finds that Apiru were not even Semitic peoples. The matter was complicated when, in the light of the research on Apiru, scholars examined the context of Hebrews in the Bible. The new analysis indicated a group broader than the Israelites and more associating with Apiru, best seen in 1 Samuel 13, 14. Na’aman and Yoel Bin-Nun point out that “Hebrew”

3048-482: Is believed to be based on the Semitic root ʕ-b-r ( ע־ב־ר ‎), meaning "beyond", "other side", "across"; interpretations of the term "Hebrew" generally render its meaning as roughly "from the other side [of the river/desert]"—i.e., an exonym for the inhabitants of the land of Israel and Judah , perhaps from the perspective of Mesopotamia , Phoenicia or Transjordan (with the river referred to being perhaps

3175-595: Is derived from Old French Ebrau , via Latin from the Ancient Greek Ἑβραῖος ( hebraîos ) and Aramaic 'ibrāy , all ultimately derived from Biblical Hebrew Ivri ( עברי ), one of several names for the Israelite ( Jewish and Samaritan ) people ( Hebrews ). It is traditionally understood to be an adjective based on the name of Abraham 's ancestor, Eber , mentioned in Genesis 10:21 . The name

3302-612: Is derived from the name of the alphabet used , in contrast to Ivrit , meaning the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet . Hebrew ceased to be a regular spoken language sometime between 200 and 400 CE, as it declined in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Bar Kokhba revolt , which was carried out against the Roman Empire by the Jews of Judaea . Aramaic and, to a lesser extent, Greek were already in use as international languages, especially among societal elites and immigrants. Hebrew survived into

3429-567: Is fighting to stop businesses from using only English signs to market their services. In 2012, a Knesset bill for the preservation of the Hebrew language was proposed, which includes the stipulation that all signage in Israel must first and foremost be in Hebrew, as with all speeches by Israeli officials abroad. The bill's author, MK Akram Hasson , stated that the bill was proposed as a response to Hebrew "losing its prestige" and children incorporating more English words into their vocabulary. Hebrew

3556-720: Is found in the cuneiform SA of SA.GAZ. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is a logogram for Akkadian "šer'ānu", translated as "muscle." The root is present in Hebrew with "srir" (שריר) for "muscle" and a verb was derived from it meaning "to struggle." "Isra" (in Israel) means "struggling" (with God). In this light, Abram the Hebrew in Genesis 14 means Abram the warrior rather than Abram the dust, the earliest and one of prominent functions of Apiru. The consensus remains that Apiru and Hebrews were not identical groups, but scholars became divided whether

3683-411: Is no text on this object. In July 2008, Israeli archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel discovered a ceramic shard at Khirbet Qeiyafa that he claimed may be the earliest Hebrew writing yet discovered, dating from around 3,000 years ago. Hebrew University archaeologist Amihai Mazar said that the inscription was "proto-Canaanite" but cautioned that "[t]he differentiation between the scripts, and between

3810-631: Is one of several languages for which the constitution of South Africa calls to be respected in their use for religious purposes. Also, Hebrew is an official national minority language in Poland , since 6 January 2005. Hamas has made Hebrew a compulsory language taught in schools in the Gaza Strip. Habiru The term was first discovered in its Akkadian version "ḫa-bi-ru" or "ḫa-pi-ru". Due to later findings in Ugaritic and Egyptian which used

3937-748: Is the official language of the State of Israel, while pre-revival forms of Hebrew are used for prayer or study in Jewish and Samaritan communities around the world today; the latter group utilizes the Samaritan dialect as their liturgical tongue. As a non- first language , it is studied mostly by non-Israeli Jews and students in Israel, by archaeologists and linguists specializing in the Middle East and its civilizations , and by theologians in Christian seminaries . The modern English word "Hebrew"

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4064-841: Is the famous Moabite Stone , written in the Moabite dialect; the Siloam inscription , found near Jerusalem , is an early example of Hebrew. Less ancient samples of Archaic Hebrew include the ostraca found near Lachish , which describe events preceding the final capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian captivity of 586 BCE. In its widest sense, Biblical Hebrew refers to the spoken language of ancient Israel flourishing between c.  1000 BCE and c.  400 CE . It comprises several evolving and overlapping dialects. The phases of Classical Hebrew are often named after important literary works associated with them. Sometimes

4191-405: Is the primary official language of the State of Israel. As of 2013 , there are about 9 million Hebrew speakers worldwide, of whom 7 million speak it fluently. Currently, 90% of Israeli Jews are proficient in Hebrew, and 70% are highly proficient. Some 60% of Israeli Arabs are also proficient in Hebrew, and 30% report having a higher proficiency in Hebrew than in Arabic. In total, about 53% of

4318-435: Is typically used to describe “Israelites in exceptional circumstances,” in particular, wandering, oppressed or enslaved Israelites struggling for liberation. Naaman finds that all biblical references to the "Hebrews" reflect some traits borrowed from the image of the second millennium Apiru. Greenberg confirms that Hebrew is an archaic term predating Israelites. Professor Albert D. Friedberg concurs, arguing that Apiru refers to

4445-547: Is used to pronounce the Hebrew Bible; however, properly it should be distinguished from the historical Biblical Hebrew of the 6th century BCE, whose original pronunciation must be reconstructed. Tiberian Hebrew incorporates the scholarship of the Masoretes (from masoret meaning "tradition"), who added vowel points and grammar points to the Hebrew letters to preserve much earlier features of Hebrew, for use in chanting

4572-650: The Chayei Adam in Hebrew, as opposed to Yiddish , as a guide to Halacha for the " average 17-year-old" (Ibid. Introduction 1). Similarly, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan 's purpose in writing the Mishnah Berurah was to "produce a work that could be studied daily so that Jews might know the proper procedures to follow minute by minute". The work was nevertheless written in Talmudic Hebrew and Aramaic, since, "the ordinary Jew [of Eastern Europe] of

4699-563: The Amarna letters and likely more closely associated with the Hebrews. Kline suggests that Apiru, besides being non-Semitic, were foes of Israel and their first oppressors in Canaan. Other scholars, by contrast, allowed the possibility of relation. As pointed out by Moore and Kelle, while the ʿApiru/Ḫabiru appear to be composed of many different peoples, including nomadic Shasu and Shutu ,

4826-598: The Apostles on their way from Samaria to Jerusalem ( Acts 8:25 ).( Hebrew language Hebrew ( Hebrew alphabet : עִבְרִית ‎, ʿĪvrīt , pronounced [ ʔivˈʁit ] or [ ʕivˈrit ] ; Samaritan script : ࠏࠨࠁࠬࠓࠪࠉࠕ ‎ ʿÎbrit ) is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family . A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages , it

4953-717: The Babylonian Captivity (606 to 536 BCE), those Judahites who remained in the Kingdom of Judah re-established the altar at Shechem to keep the Israelite worship system going when access to the Temple in Jerusalem was cut off. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Shechem was the main settlement of the Samaritans , whose religious center stood on Mount Gerizim, just outside the town. In 6 CE, Shechem

5080-512: The Euphrates , Jordan or Litani ; or maybe the northern Arabian Desert between Babylonia and Canaan ). Compare the word Habiru or cognate Assyrian ebru , of identical meaning. One of the earliest references to the language's name as " Ivrit " is found in the prologue to the Book of Sirach , from the 2nd century BCE. The Hebrew Bible does not use the term "Hebrew" in reference to

5207-468: The Gospel of John ( John 4:5) refers to Shechem or to another nearby village: "So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph ." John 4 ( John 4:15 ) mentions one of the women of Sychar going to Jacob's Well . Some scholars believe the location of Sychar is at the foot of Mount Ebal , but other scholars disagree because the proposed location

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5334-520: The Gospel of Matthew . (See the Hebrew Gospel hypothesis or Language of Jesus for more details on Hebrew and Aramaic in the gospels.) The term "Mishnaic Hebrew" generally refers to the Hebrew dialects found in the Talmud , excepting quotations from the Hebrew Bible. The dialects organize into Mishnaic Hebrew (also called Tannaitic Hebrew, Early Rabbinic Hebrew, or Mishnaic Hebrew I), which

5461-627: The Habiru . Labaya was the author of three Amarna letters ( EA 252 , EA 253 , and EA 254 ), and his name appears in 11 of the other 382 letters, referred to 28 times, with the basic topic of the letter, being Labaya himself, and his relationship with the rebelling, countryside Habiru. Shechem may be identical to the Sakama mentioned in an account dated to the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt (around 1200 BCE). (See Papyrus Anastasi I .) During

5588-612: The Hebrew Bible as the first capital of the Kingdom of Israel following the split of the United Monarchy . According to Joshua 21:20–21 , it was located in the tribal territorial allotment of the tribe of Ephraim . Shechem declined after the fall of the northern Kingdom of Israel . The city later regained its importance as a prominent Samaritan center during the Hellenistic period . Traditionally associated with

5715-682: The Maccabean Revolt (167–160 BCE) and the emergence of the Hasmonean kingdom , the Great Jewish Revolt (66–73 CE), and the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE). The nationalist significance of Hebrew manifested in various ways throughout this period. Michael Owen Wise notes that "Beginning with the time of the Hasmonean revolt [...] Hebrew came to the fore in an expression akin to modern nationalism. A form of classical Hebrew

5842-536: The Second Aliyah , it replaced a score of languages spoken by Jews at that time. Those languages were Jewish dialects of local languages, including Judaeo-Spanish (also called "Judezmo" and "Ladino"), Yiddish , Judeo-Arabic and Bukhori (Tajiki), or local languages spoken in the Jewish diaspora such as Russian , Persian and Arabic . The major result of the literary work of the Hebrew intellectuals along

5969-570: The Sumerians knew a group of Aramaean nomads living in southern Mesopotamia as SA.GAZ, which meant "trespassers". The later Akkadians inherited the term, which was rendered as the calque Habiru , properly ʿApiru . The term occurs in hundreds of 2nd millennium BCE documents covering a 600-year period from the 18th to the 12th centuries BCE and found at sites ranging from Egypt, Canaan and Syria, to Nuzi (near Kirkuk in northern Iraq) and Anatolia (Turkey). Not all Habiru were brigands: in

6096-399: The literary and liturgical language into everyday spoken language . However, his brand of Hebrew followed norms that had been replaced in Eastern Europe by different grammar and style, in the writings of people like Ahad Ha'am and others. His organizational efforts and involvement with the establishment of schools and the writing of textbooks pushed the vernacularization activity into

6223-408: The medieval period as the language of Jewish liturgy , rabbinic literature , intra-Jewish commerce, and Jewish poetic literature . The first dated book printed in Hebrew was published by Abraham Garton in Reggio ( Calabria , Italy) in 1475. With the rise of Zionism in the 19th century, the Hebrew language experienced a full-scale revival as a spoken and literary language. The creation of

6350-436: The sumerograms SA.GAZ. Akkadian dictionaries for sumerograms added to SA.GAZ the gloss "ḫabatu" (raider), which raised the suggestion to read the sumerograms as this word. However, the Amarna letters attested the spelling SA.GA.AZ, and letters from Ugarit attested the spelling SAG.GAZ, which points that these sumerograms were read as written, and did not function as ideograms . The only Akkadian word which fits such spelling

6477-441: The "great tree of Moreh " at Shechem and offered sacrifice nearby. Genesis, Deuteronomy , Joshua and Judges hallow Shechem over all other cities of the land of Israel. According to Genesis (12:6–7) Abram "built an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him… and had given that land to his descendants" at Shechem. The Bible states that on this occasion, God confirmed the covenant he had first made with Abraham in Harran, regarding

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6604-443: The 18th century BCE a north Syrian king named Irkabtum (c. 1740 BCE) "made peace with [the warlord ] Shemuba and his Habiru," while the ʿApiru, Idrimi of Alalakh, was the son of a deposed king, and formed a band of ʿApiru to make himself king of Alalakh . What Idrimi shared with the other ʿApiru was membership of an inferior social class of outlaws, mercenaries, and slaves leading a marginal and sometimes lawless existence on

6731-454: The 1980s in the USSR , Hebrew studies reappeared due to people struggling for permission to go to Israel ( refuseniks ). Several of the teachers were imprisoned, e.g. Yosef Begun , Ephraim Kholmyansky , Yevgeny Korostyshevsky and others responsible for a Hebrew learning network connecting many cities of the USSR. Standard Hebrew, as developed by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, was based on Mishnaic spelling and Sephardi Hebrew pronunciation. However,

6858-535: The 19th century was a lexical modernization of Hebrew. New words and expressions were adapted as neologisms from the large corpus of Hebrew writings since the Hebrew Bible, or borrowed from Arabic (mainly by Ben-Yehuda) and older Aramaic and Latin. Many new words were either borrowed from or coined after European languages, especially English, Russian, German, and French. Modern Hebrew became an official language in British-ruled Palestine in 1921 (along with English and Arabic), and then in 1948 became an official language of

6985-442: The Abbasid and Ottoman periods. In 1903 near Nablus, a German party of archaeologists led by Dr. Hermann Thiersch stumbled upon the site called Tell Balata and now identified as ancient Shechem. Nablus is still referred to as Shechem by Israeli Hebrew speakers, even though the original site of Shechem lies east of the modern-day city. Shechem first appears in the Hebrew Bible in Genesis 12:6–8, which says that Abraham reached

7112-579: The Aramaized Rabbinic Hebrew of the Talmud. Hebrew persevered through the ages as the main language for written purposes by all Jewish communities around the world for a large range of uses—not only liturgy, but also poetry, philosophy, science and medicine, commerce, daily correspondence and contracts. There have been many deviations from this generalization such as Bar Kokhba 's letters to his lieutenants, which were mostly in Aramaic, and Maimonides' writings, which were mostly in Arabic; but overall, Hebrew did not cease to be used for such purposes. For example,

7239-503: The British Mandate who at the turn of the 20th century were arriving in large numbers from diverse countries and speaking different languages. A Committee of the Hebrew Language was established. After the establishment of Israel, it became the Academy of the Hebrew Language . The results of Ben-Yehuda's lexicographical work were published in a dictionary ( The Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew , Ben-Yehuda Dictionary ). The seeds of Ben-Yehuda's work fell on fertile ground, and by

7366-498: The Fertile Crescent they are also often depicted as auxiliary warriors. In the Amarna letters, Apiru are most prominent in military activity. Some hypotheses on Genesis 14 suggested a foreign, perhaps Babylonian, document at the core, or a memory of time when Abram belonged to Apiru before the term Hebrew obtained an ethnic meaning. Elsewhere in the Bible, the Israelites are called Hebrews when enslaved or oppressed and struggling for liberation. The military context associates with one of

7493-416: The Great conquered Babylon, he allowed the Jewish people to return from captivity. In time, a local version of Aramaic came to be spoken in Israel alongside Hebrew. By the beginning of the Common Era , Aramaic was the primary colloquial language of Samarian , Babylonian and Galileean Jews, and western and intellectual Jews spoke Greek , but a form of so-called Rabbinic Hebrew continued to be used as

7620-706: The Habiru, there have been many theories linking these to the Hebrews of the Bible . Most of these theories were based on the supposed etymological link and were widely denied basing on the Egyptian sources and later following the Ugaritic and Hittite discoveries. There are two main barriers, linguistic and group identity. Most scholars, Anson Rainey and R. Steven Notley among them, deny any linguistic relationship between Abiru and Hebrew, or at most admit only "a bare possibility." But this view remains short of academic consensus. Philologically, argued Moshe Greenberg , Apiru and Hebrew though not transparently related are not irreconcilable. Nadav Na’aman had no doubt that

7747-437: The Hebrew Bible. The Masoretes inherited a biblical text whose letters were considered too sacred to be altered, so their markings were in the form of pointing in and around the letters. The Syriac alphabet , precursor to the Arabic alphabet , also developed vowel pointing systems around this time. The Aleppo Codex , a Hebrew Bible with the Masoretic pointing, was written in the 10th century, likely in Tiberias, and survives into

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7874-454: The Israeli population speaks Hebrew as a native language, while most of the rest speak it fluently. In 2013 Hebrew was the native language of 49% of Israelis over the age of 20, with Russian , Arabic , French , English , Yiddish and Ladino being the native tongues of most of the rest. Some 26% of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and 12% of Arabs reported speaking Hebrew poorly or not at all. Steps have been taken to keep Hebrew

8001-409: The Israelites at Shechem and asked them to choose between serving the God of Abraham who had delivered them from Egypt, or the false gods which their ancestors had served on the other side of the Euphrates River , or the gods of the Amorites in whose land they now lived. The people chose to serve the God of the Bible, a decision which Joshua recorded in the Book of the Law of God, and he then erected

8128-417: The Middle East was the closely related Aramaic language, then Greek , scholarly opinions on the exact dating of that shift have changed very much. In the first half of the 20th century, most scholars followed Abraham Geiger and Gustaf Dalman in thinking that Aramaic became a spoken language in the land of Israel as early as the beginning of Israel's Hellenistic period in the 4th century BCE, and that as

8255-417: The Shechemites that, if "every male among you is circumcised, then we will give our daughters to you and take your daughters to ourselves." Once the Shechemites agree to the mass circumcision, however, Jacob's sons repay them by killing all of the city's male inhabitants. Following the settlement of the Israelites in Canaan after their Exodus from Egypt, according to the biblical narrative, Joshua assembled

8382-449: The Talmud, the Gemara , generally comments on the Mishnah and Baraitot in two forms of Aramaic. Nevertheless, Hebrew survived as a liturgical and literary language in the form of later Amoraic Hebrew, which occasionally appears in the text of the Gemara, particularly in the Jerusalem Talmud and the classical aggadah midrashes . Hebrew was always regarded as the language of Israel's religion, history and national pride, and after it faded as

8509-406: The Talmud, various regional literary dialects of Medieval Hebrew evolved. The most important is Tiberian Hebrew or Masoretic Hebrew, a local dialect of Tiberias in Galilee that became the standard for vocalizing the Hebrew Bible and thus still influences all other regional dialects of Hebrew. This Tiberian Hebrew from the 7th to 10th century CE is sometimes called "Biblical Hebrew" because it

8636-422: The ability to speak the language and attempted to promote its use. According to the Jerusalem Talmud , Megillah 1:9: "Rebbi Jonathan from Bet Guvrrin said, four languages are appropriate that the world should use them, and they are these: The Foreign Language (Greek) for song, Latin for war, Syriac for elegies, Hebrew for speech. Some are saying, also Assyrian (Hebrew script) for writing." The later section of

8763-411: The above phases of spoken Classical Hebrew are simplified into "Biblical Hebrew" (including several dialects from the 10th century BCE to 2nd century BCE and extant in certain Dead Sea Scrolls) and "Mishnaic Hebrew" (including several dialects from the 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE and extant in certain other Dead Sea Scrolls). However, today most Hebrew linguists classify Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew as

8890-455: The average Jew, and that the language had evolved since Biblical times as spoken languages do. Recent scholarship recognizes that reports of Jews speaking in Aramaic indicate a multilingual society, not necessarily the primary language spoken. Alongside Aramaic, Hebrew co-existed within Israel as a spoken language. Most scholars now date the demise of Hebrew as a spoken language to the end of the Roman period , or about 200 CE. It continued on as

9017-428: The beginning of the 20th century, Hebrew was well on its way to becoming the main language of the Jewish population of both Ottoman and British Palestine. At the time, members of the Old Yishuv and a very few Hasidic sects, most notably those under the auspices of Satmar , refused to speak Hebrew and spoke only Yiddish. In the Soviet Union, the use of Hebrew, along with other Jewish cultural and religious activities,

9144-408: The biblical Midianites , Kenites , and Amalekites , as well as displaced peasants and pastoralists, they also may be related to the biblical Hebrews. A hypothesis emerged that Hebrews were one offshoot of Apiru, a larger whole from which the Hebrews originated. It has become a commonplace assumption that all Israelites were Hebrews but not all Hebrews were Israelites. The ethnic connotation of

9271-455: The book. The Jewish Encyclopedia went as far as to state that Shechem is the only city to meet all the requirements for Bethulia's location, and stated: "The identity of Bethulia with Shechem is thus beyond all question". Shechem is mentioned in The Book of Acts ( Acts 7 , Acts 7:16 ). It is not known whether the Samaritan city of Sychar ( ‹See Tfd› Greek : Συχαρ , Sykhar ) in

9398-576: The city in whose proximity it was found) is written in an old Semitic script, akin to the Phoenician one that, through the Greeks and Etruscans , later became the Latin alphabet of ancient Rome . The Gezer calendar is written without any vowels , and it does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places in which later Hebrew spelling requires them. Numerous older tablets have been found in

9525-524: The city of Nablus , Shechem is now identified with the nearby site of Tell Balata in the Balata al-Balad suburb of the West Bank . Shechem's position is indicated in the Hebrew Bible : it lay north of Bethel and Shiloh , on the high road going from Jerusalem to the northern districts ( Judges xxi, 19), at a short distance from Michmethath ( Joshua 17:7) and of Dothain ( Genesis 37:12–17); it

9652-547: The city was destined to play an important part in the history of Israel. Jerubbaal (Gideon) , whose home was at Ophrah , visited Shechem, and his concubine who lived there was mother of his son Abimelech ( Judges 8:31). She came from one of the leading Shechemite families who were influential with the "Lords of Shechem" (Judges 9:1–3, wording of the New Revised Standard Version and New American Bible Revised Edition ). After Gideon's death, Abimelech

9779-602: The composition of 1 Maccabees in archaizing Hebrew, Hasmonean coinage under John Hyrcanus (134-104 BCE), and coins from both the Great Revolt and Bar Kokhba Revolt featuring exclusively Hebrew and Palaeo-Hebrew script inscriptions. This deliberate use of Hebrew and Paleo-Hebrew script in official contexts, despite limited literacy, served as a symbol of Jewish nationalism and political independence. The Christian New Testament contains some Semitic place names and quotes. The language of such Semitic glosses (and in general

9906-471: The consonants ʿ, p and r, and in light of the well-established sound change from Northwest Semitic ʿ to Akkadian ḫ, the root of this term is proven to be ʿ-p-r. This root means "dust, dirt", and links to the characterization of the ʿApiru as nomads, mercenaries, people who are not part of the cultural society. The morphological pattern of the word is qatilu, which point to a status, condition. The Akkadian term Ḫabiru occasionally alternates with

10033-568: The dialects of Classical Hebrew that functioned as a living language in the land of Israel. A transitional form of the language occurs in the other works of Tannaitic literature dating from the century beginning with the completion of the Mishnah. These include the halachic Midrashim ( Sifra , Sifre , Mekhilta etc.) and the expanded collection of Mishnah-related material known as the Tosefta . The Talmud contains excerpts from these works, as well as further Tannaitic material not attested elsewhere;

10160-513: The earliest speakers of Modern Hebrew had Yiddish as their native language and often introduced calques from Yiddish and phono-semantic matchings of international words. Despite using Sephardic Hebrew pronunciation as its primary basis, modern Israeli Hebrew has adapted to Ashkenazi Hebrew phonology in some respects, mainly the following: The vocabulary of Israeli Hebrew is much larger than that of earlier periods. According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann : The number of attested Biblical Hebrew words

10287-590: The early 6th century BCE, the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered the ancient Kingdom of Judah , destroying much of Jerusalem and exiling its population far to the east in Babylon . During the Babylonian captivity , many Israelites learned Aramaic, the closely related Semitic language of their captors. Thus, for a significant period, the Jewish elite became influenced by Aramaic. After Cyrus

10414-647: The early saint Justin Martyr ; we hear even of bishops of Neapolis. On several occasions the Christians suffered greatly at the hands of the Samaritans. In 474 the emperor, to avenge what Christians considered an unjust attack by the Samaritans, deprived the latter of Mt. Gerizim and gave it to the Christians, who built on it a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin . The city of Nablus was Islamicized in

10541-463: The fall of Jerusalem (587 BC; Jeremiah 12:5 ). The events connected with the restoration were to bring it again into prominence. When, on his second visit to Jerusalem, Nehemiah expelled the grandson of the high priest Eliashib (probably the Manasse of Josephus, Antiquities , XI, vii, viii) and with him the many Jews, priests and laymen, who sided with the rebel, these betook themselves to Shechem;

10668-436: The finding of what he claims to be the oldest known Hebrew inscription, a curse tablet found at Mount Ebal , dated from around 3200 years ago. The presence of the Hebrew name of god , Yahweh, as three letters, Yod-Heh-Vav (YHV), according to the author and his team meant that the tablet is Hebrew and not Canaanite. However, practically all professional archeologists and epigraphers apart from Stripling's team claim that there

10795-711: The first Middle East printing press, in Safed (modern Israel), produced a small number of books in Hebrew in 1577, which were then sold to the nearby Jewish world. This meant not only that well-educated Jews in all parts of the world could correspond in a mutually intelligible language, and that books and legal documents published or written in any part of the world could be read by Jews in all other parts, but that an educated Jew could travel and converse with Jews in distant places, just as priests and other educated Christians could converse in Latin. For example, Rabbi Avraham Danzig wrote

10922-592: The fringes of settled society. ʿApiru had no common ethnic affiliations and no common language, their personal names being most frequently West Semitic , but also East Semitic , Hurrian or Indo-European . "The Conquest of Joppa" tale in hieroglyphs In the Amarna letters from the 14th century BCE, the petty kings of Canaan describe them sometimes as outlaws, sometimes as mercenaries, and sometimes as day labourers and servants. Usually they are socially marginal, but Rib-Hadda of Byblos calls Abdi-Ashirta of Amurru (modern Lebanon) and his son ʿApiru, with

11049-406: The generic term for these passages is Baraitot . The dialect of all these works is very similar to Mishnaic Hebrew. About a century after the publication of the Mishnah, Mishnaic Hebrew fell into disuse as a spoken language. By the third century CE, sages could no longer identify the Hebrew names of many plants mentioned in the Mishnah. Only a few sages, primarily in the southern regions, retained

11176-491: The holy tongue ' or ' the tongue [of] holiness ' ) since ancient times. The language was not referred to by the name Hebrew in the Bible , but as Yehudit ( transl.  ' Judean ' ) or Səpaṯ Kəna'an ( transl.  "the language of Canaan " ). Mishnah Gittin 9:8 refers to the language as Ivrit , meaning Hebrew; however, Mishnah Megillah refers to the language as Ashurit , meaning Assyrian , which

11303-413: The identity, the academic consensus is well established that Apiru and Hebrews represent two different groups. The Biblical Hebrews are an ethnic group while Apiru were a much wider multi-ethnic group distinguished by social status. The morphological pattern of the word ʿApiru is, as mentioned above, qatilu, which point a status, as opposed to the morphological pattern of the ethnonym עִבְרִי (Hebrew) which

11430-408: The implication that they have rebelled against their common overlord, the pharaoh . In The Taking of Joppa (now Jaffa ), an Egyptian work of historical fiction from around 1440 BCE, they appear as brigands , and General Djehuty asks at one point that his horses be taken inside the city lest a passing ʿApir steal them. Since the discovery of the 2nd millennium BCE inscriptions mentioning

11557-461: The interpretations suggested for Apiru. In Sumerogram SA.GAZ, SA could mean "muscle" and GAZ "to strike" or "kill." The meaning "murderer" or "killer" was suggested for the combination SA.GAZ, or literally "muscle killer." SA.GAZ was supposed to be a transliteration of the Accadian pseudo-ideogram šaggāšum or murderer. The Epic of Gilgamesh (1:4:7) uses saggasum for Enkidu describing him as

11684-587: The language of the Hebrew people; its later historiography, in the Book of Kings , refers to it as יְהוּדִית Yehudit " Judahite (language)". Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of languages . Canaanite languages are a branch of the Northwest Semitic family of languages. Hebrew was the spoken language in the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel and Judah during the period from about 1200 to 586 BCE. Epigraphic evidence from this period confirms

11811-465: The language spoken by Jews in scenes from the New Testament) is often referred to as "Hebrew" in the text, although this term is often re-interpreted as referring to Aramaic instead and is rendered accordingly in recent translations. Nonetheless, these glosses can be interpreted as Hebrew as well. It has been argued that Hebrew, rather than Aramaic or Koine Greek, lay behind the composition of

11938-471: The language. The revival of the Hebrew language as a mother tongue was initiated in the late 19th century by the efforts of Ben-Yehuda. He joined the Jewish national movement and in 1881 immigrated to Palestine , then a part of the Ottoman Empire . Motivated by the surrounding ideals of renovation and rejection of the diaspora " shtetl " lifestyle, Ben-Yehuda set out to develop tools for making

12065-499: The languages themselves in that period, remains unclear", and suggested that calling the text Hebrew might be going too far. The Gezer calendar also dates back to the 10th century BCE at the beginning of the Monarchic period , the traditional time of the reign of David and Solomon . Classified as Archaic Biblical Hebrew , the calendar presents a list of seasons and related agricultural activities. The Gezer calendar (named after

12192-727: The newly declared State of Israel . Hebrew is the most widely spoken language in Israel today. In the Modern Period, from the 19th century onward, the literary Hebrew tradition revived as the spoken language of modern Israel, called variously Israeli Hebrew , Modern Israeli Hebrew , Modern Hebrew , New Hebrew , Israeli Standard Hebrew , Standard Hebrew and so on. Israeli Hebrew exhibits some features of Sephardic Hebrew from its local Jerusalemite tradition but adapts it with numerous neologisms, borrowed terms (often technical) from European languages and adopted terms (often colloquial) from Arabic. The literary and narrative use of Hebrew

12319-411: The old one. This city's name was eventually corrupted to the modern Nablus . Josephus , writing in about 90 CE ( Jewish Antiquities 4.8.44), placed the city between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal. Elsewhere he refers to it as Neapolis. In Emperor Hadrian 's reign, the temple on Mt. Gerizim was restored and dedicated to Jupiter . Like Shechem, Neapolis had a very early Christian community, including

12446-499: The original meaning of the word has been changed." Loretz assigns all mentions of Hebrew in the Bible to post-exilic period centuries after Apiru disappeared from the sources. Greenberg concluded his research: The ʿApiru were ethnically diverse but this term can be related to the term "Hebrew" both in etymology and meaning. The ethnic and social spheres may have met in Abraham the Hebrew, who may at once have been an Apiru as well as

12573-535: The other being Aramaic , still spoken today. The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date back to the 10th century BCE. Nearly all of the Hebrew Bible is written in Biblical Hebrew , with much of its present form in the dialect that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BCE, during the time of the Babylonian captivity . For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as Lashon Hakodesh ( לְשׁוֹן הַקֹּדֶש , lit.   '

12700-480: The possession of the land of Canaan. In Jewish tradition, the old name was understood in terms of the Hebrew word shékém – "shoulder, saddle ", corresponding to the mountainous configuration of the place. On a later sojourn, two sons of Jacob , Simeon and Levi , avenged their sister Dinah 's abduction and rape by " Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite , the prince of the land" of Shechem. Shimon and Levi said to

12827-643: The present day. It is perhaps the most important Hebrew manuscript in existence. During the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain , important work was done by grammarians in explaining the grammar and vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew; much of this was based on the work of the grammarians of Classical Arabic . Important Hebrew grammarians were Judah ben David Hayyuj , Jonah ibn Janah , Abraham ibn Ezra and later (in Provence ), David Kimhi . A great deal of poetry

12954-635: The primary language of use, and to prevent large-scale incorporation of English words into the Hebrew vocabulary. The Academy of the Hebrew Language of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem currently invents about 2,000 new Hebrew words each year for modern words by finding an original Hebrew word that captures the meaning, as an alternative to incorporating more English words into Hebrew vocabulary. The Haifa municipality has banned officials from using English words in official documents, and

13081-451: The region was Old Aramaic . Hebrew was extinct as a colloquial language by late antiquity , but it continued to be used as a literary language, especially in Spain, as the language of commerce between Jews of different native languages, and as the liturgical language of Judaism, evolving various dialects of literary Medieval Hebrew , until its revival as a spoken language in the late 19th century. In May 2023, Scott Stripling published

13208-431: The region with similar scripts written in other Semitic languages, for example, Proto-Sinaitic . It is believed that the original shapes of the script go back to Egyptian hieroglyphs , though the phonetic values are instead inspired by the acrophonic principle. The common ancestor of Hebrew and Phoenician is called Canaanite , and was the first to use a Semitic alphabet distinct from that of Egyptian. One ancient document

13335-674: The rest of the Middle East; and eventually Greek functioned as another international language with the eastern areas of the Roman Empire. William Schniedewind argues that after waning in the Persian period, the religious importance of Hebrew grew in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and cites epigraphical evidence that Hebrew survived as a vernacular language – though both its grammar and its writing system had been substantially influenced by Aramaic. According to another summary, Greek

13462-493: The southern villages of Judea." In other words, "in terms of dialect geography, at the time of the tannaim Palestine could be divided into the Aramaic-speaking regions of Galilee and Samaria and a smaller area, Judaea, in which Rabbinic Hebrew was used among the descendants of returning exiles." In addition, it has been surmised that Koine Greek was the primary vehicle of communication in coastal cities and among

13589-474: The spoken language of the Russian Jews, should be treated as their only national language, while Hebrew was to be treated as a foreign language. Hebrew books and periodicals ceased to be published and were seized from the libraries, although liturgical texts were still published until the 1930s. Despite numerous protests, a policy of suppression of the teaching of Hebrew operated from the 1930s on. Later in

13716-460: The term Hebrew synonymous with the people of Israel were attributed to the later Jewish tradition. "It could well be", writes Stuart A. West, "that the word Hebrew was originally only a sociological designation, indicating status or class - in which case the words Hebrew and Habiru are synonymous. The fact that in the later Books of the Bible and in its usage in post-biblical times, the word Hebrew has been used as an ethnic designation simply means that

13843-416: The term “Hebrew” was derived from “Habiru.” The Christian priestly scholars, such as Manfred Weippert, Henry Cazelles and Oswald Loretz, are the least ready to give up the relation between Apiru and Hebrew. For them the linguistic equation between Apiru and Hebrew is easy and comfortable. Loretz, however, admits the etymological possibility despite denying all equations between Apiru and Hebrew. Regarding

13970-410: The two groups were related. Some scholars remained unmoved and deny any relation. Those relating Apiru and Hebrews were mistaken, states Rainey. All attempts to relate the two are wishful thinking. He notes that while ʿApiru covered the regions from Nuzi to Anatolia as well as Northern Syria, Canaan and Egypt, they were distinguished from Shutu (Sutu) or Shasu (Shosu), Syrian pastoral nomads named in

14097-580: The upper class of Jerusalem , while Aramaic was prevalent in the lower class of Jerusalem, but not in the surrounding countryside. After the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 2nd century CE, Judaeans were forced to disperse. Many relocated to Galilee, so most remaining native speakers of Hebrew at that last stage would have been found in the north. Many scholars have pointed out that Hebrew continued to be used alongside Aramaic during Second Temple times, not only for religious purposes but also for nationalistic reasons, especially during revolts such as

14224-413: The widely accepted view that the earlier layers of biblical literature reflect the language used in these kingdoms. Furthermore, the content of Hebrew inscriptions suggests that the written texts closely mirror the spoken language of that time. Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew was a spoken vernacular in ancient times following the Babylonian exile when the predominant international language in

14351-474: Was a spoken language , and Amoraic Hebrew (also called Late Rabbinic Hebrew or Mishnaic Hebrew II), which was a literary language . The earlier section of the Talmud is the Mishnah that was published around 200 CE, although many of the stories take place much earlier, and were written in the earlier Mishnaic dialect. The dialect is also found in certain Dead Sea Scrolls. Mishnaic Hebrew is considered to be one of

14478-563: Was a verb "to dust," meaning "to fight" or "to struggle." Gilgamesh and Aga twice (70-81, 92-99) says "myriad dusted," meaning "myriad fought." Andrew R. George translated this literally as "myriad rolled in the dust," and the Sumerian Corpus, less successfully, as "multitudes were smeared with the dust." Whether borrowed from Sumer or not, a similar combination is present in Hebrew, with "abak" (אבק) for "dust" and "maabak" (מאבק) for "struggle." Another link between Apiru and struggle

14605-551: Was already practiced. During the Early Bronze Age , activity seems to have moved to the nearby area of Khirbet Makhneh el-Fauqa. Some publications claim that Shechem is mentioned in the third-millennium Ebla tablets , but this has been denied by archaeologists. The first substantial building activity at Shechem (Strata XXII-XXI) dates from the Middle Bronze Age IIA ( c.  1900 BCE ). It became

14732-587: Was annexed to the Roman Province of Judea . Of the Samaritans of Sichem not a few rose up in arms on Mt. Gerizim at the time of the Galilean rebellion (67 CE), which was part of the First Jewish–Roman War . The city was very likely destroyed by Sextus Vettulenus Cerialis , during that war. In 72 CE, a new city, Flavia Neapolis, was built by Vespasian 2 kilometers (1.2 mi) to the west of

14859-470: Was destroyed ( Antiquities , XIII, ix, 1). The Book of Judith , which is considered scripture to the Roman Catholic , Eastern Orthodox and other Christian churches is set in a city called "Bethulia". Because there is no Bethulia, it is widely assumed that this is a pseudonym for another city. The most common theory is that the city of Bethulia is really Shechem, based on the geography described in

14986-493: Was in the hill-country of Ephraim (Joshua 20:7; 21:21; 1 Kings 12:25; 1 Chronicles 6:67; 7:28), immediately below Mount Gerizim (Judges 9:6–7). These indications are substantiated by Josephus , who says that the city lay between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, and by the Madaba map , which places its Sykhem between one of its two sets of "Tour Gobel" (Ebal) and the "Tour Garizin" (Garizim). The site of Shechem in patristic sources

15113-421: Was made king (Judges 9:1–45). Jotham , the youngest son of Gideon, made an allegorical speech on Mount Gerizim in which he warned the people of Shechem about Abimelech's future tyranny (Judges 9:7–20). When the city rose in rebellion three years later, Abimelech took it, utterly destroyed it, and burnt the temple of Baal-berith where the people had fled for safety. The city was rebuilt in the 10th century BC and

15240-565: Was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a first language until after 200 CE and as the liturgical language of Judaism (since the Second Temple period ) and Samaritanism . The language was revived as a spoken language in the 19th century, and is the only successful large-scale example of linguistic revival . It is the only Canaanite language, as well as one of only two Northwest Semitic languages, with

15367-491: Was now a more significant written language than Aramaic within Judaea." This nationalist aspect was further emphasized during periods of conflict, as Hannah Cotton observing in her analysis of legal documents during the Jewish revolts against Rome that "Hebrew became the symbol of Jewish nationalism, of the independent Jewish State." The nationalist use of Hebrew is evidenced in several historical documents and artefacts, including

15494-548: Was probably the capital of Ephraim (1 Kings 4). Shechem was the place appointed, after Solomon 's death, for the meeting of the people of Israel and the investiture of his son Rehoboam as king; the meeting ended in the secession of the ten northern tribes, and Shechem, fortified by Jeroboam , became the capital of the new kingdom (1 Kings 12:1; 14:17; 2 Chronicles 10:1). After the kings of Israel moved, first to Tirzah ( 1 Kings 14:17 ) and later on to Samaria , Shechem lost its importance, and we do not hear of it until after

15621-629: Was revived beginning with the Haskalah movement. The first secular periodical in Hebrew, Ha-Me'assef (The Gatherer), was published by maskilim in Königsberg (today's Kaliningrad ) from 1783 onwards. In the mid-19th century, publications of several Eastern European Hebrew-language newspapers (e.g. Hamagid , founded in Ełk in 1856) multiplied. Prominent poets were Hayim Nahman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky ; there were also novels written in

15748-531: Was suppressed. Soviet authorities considered the use of Hebrew "reactionary" since it was associated with Zionism, and the teaching of Hebrew at primary and secondary schools was officially banned by the People's Commissariat for Education as early as 1919, as part of an overall agenda aiming to secularize education (the language itself did not cease to be studied at universities for historical and linguistic purposes ). The official ordinance stated that Yiddish, being

15875-551: Was the language of government, Hebrew the language of prayer, study and religious texts, and Aramaic was the language of legal contracts and trade. There was also a geographic pattern: according to Bernard Spolsky , by the beginning of the Common Era, " Judeo-Aramaic was mainly used in Galilee in the north, Greek was concentrated in the former colonies and around governmental centers, and Hebrew monolingualism continued mainly in

16002-408: Was to a certain extent a pidgin . Near the end of that century the Jewish activist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda , owing to the ideology of the national revival ( שיבת ציון , Shivat Tziyon , later Zionism ), began reviving Hebrew as a modern spoken language. Eventually, as a result of the local movement he created, but more significantly as a result of the new groups of immigrants known under the name of

16129-570: Was written, by poets such as Dunash ben Labrat , Solomon ibn Gabirol , Judah ha-Levi , Moses ibn Ezra and Abraham ibn Ezra , in a "purified" Hebrew based on the work of these grammarians, and in Arabic quantitative or strophic meters. This literary Hebrew was later used by Italian Jewish poets. The need to express scientific and philosophical concepts from Classical Greek and Medieval Arabic motivated Medieval Hebrew to borrow terminology and grammar from these other languages, or to coin equivalent terms from existing Hebrew roots, giving rise to

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