Modern Hebrew can trace its ancestry to Biblical Hebrew, but has incorporated many other influences as well. Despite a revival of the language during the Maccabean era, it was eventually all but replaced in everyday usage by Aramaic. While Hebrew remained the sacred tongue of the Jews, its use as a common spoken language declined after the Jews’ return from exile (538 B.C.). Its alphabet consists of 22 characters, all consonants (don’t worry vowels were eventually added), and is written from right to left. Isaiah 19:18 calls it “the language of Canaan,” while other verses label it “Judean” and “language of the Jews” ( 2 Kings 18:26 Isaiah 36:11, 13 2 Chronicles 32:18 Nehemiah 13:24).Īncient Hebrew is a Semitic language that dates back past 1500 B.C. It’s strange to think that we might hardly recognize the most influential book in the world in its original form! What was the language of the Old Testament?Īncient Hebrew was the tongue of the ancient Israelites and the language in which most of the Old Testament was penned. While a modern version of each of these languages is spoken today, most modern readers of those languages would have some difficulty with the ancient versions used in the biblical texts. The Bible was actually written in three different ancient languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Ancient Greek? Latin, perhaps? What was the original Bible language? What language was the Bible originally written in? Pastors and seminarians can probably answer that easily enough, but the rest of us might have only a vague idea that the Bible was written in one of those “dead” languages.
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