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Hebrew: Ancient Hebrew
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Hebrew is the language of the Tanakh (the Jewish Bible or The Old Testament). It is the language of the ancient Israelites and of the State of Israel today. Hebrew was spoken in the Land of Israel until about the year 200 C.E. at which point it ceased to be an everyday, spoken language, and became a sacred tongue used for prayer, religious studies and writing, and as a lingua franca for Jews who had no other language in common. Yet despite its sacred status, the Hebrew language never really became a ‘dead language.’ New lexical items, morphological forms and syntactical changes accrued to it across the almost 2,000 years that it was not commonly spoken.
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Hebrew is the original language of the Bible. It has played a central role in the cultural history of the Jewish people for the past three millennia, and has had an important impact on Western culture. Ancient Hebrew names such as Jacob, Joseph, Sarah, and Mary, and old Hebrew words or concepts such as "amen," "hallelujah," "hosanna," "Sabbath," and "Messiah" have survived, resisting translation in many languages and cultures.
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All previous Biblical Hebrew lexicons have provided a modern western definition and perspective to Hebrew roots and words. This prevents the reader of the Bible from seeing the ancient authors original intent of the passages. This is the first Biblical Hebrew lexicon that defines each Hebrew word within its original Ancient Hebrew cultural meaning. One of the major differences between the Modern Western mind and the Ancient Hebrew's is that their mind related all words and their meanings to a concrete concept. For instance, the Hebrew word "chai" is normally translated as "life", a western abstract meaning, but the original Hebrew concrete meaning of this word is the "stomach". In the Ancient Hebrew mind, a full stomach is a sign of a full "life".
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A Committee of the Hebrew Language was established. Later it became the Academy of the Hebrew Language, an organization that exists today. The results of his and the Committee's work were published in a dictionary (The Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew). Ben-Yehuda's work fell on fertile ground, and by 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 Yishuv HaYashan and very few Chasidic sects, most notably those under the auspices of Satmar refused to speak Hebrew and only spoke Yiddish. However, today very few sects do not speak Hebrew in Israel.[7]
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Biblical Hebrew students develop appreciation for the Hebrew Bible and competence to read prose and poetry. The program is designed to provide students with habits of study that they may enjoy a life-long exploration of the Hebrew Bible. The program is calculated (together with the Ancient Near Eastern Studies major) to prepare students for further study in graduate programs and other career options. Biblical Hebrew students gain a heightened sensitivity of their own scriptural tradition, and an awareness of the contributions of ancient prophets, and the formation and transmission of the Hebrew Bible.
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The renaissance of Hebrew as a spoken language in the twentieth century was closely linked to the national revival of the Jewish people in their forefathers' land. Hebrew was revived thanks to the efforts of a small group of devoted people, led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1857 - 1922), who in 1881 settled in Jerusalem and pioneered Hebrew usage at home and in school. He published a Hebrew periodical, promoted the coining of new words, and cofounded the Language Committee (1890 - 1953), which began dealing with language planning issues and set normative measures. Above all, Ben-Yehuda compiled several volumes of the first modern dictionary of ancient and modern Hebrew.
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Ancient Hebrew