What is Biblical Hebrew?
Hebrew belongs to the Semitic language family– a family of languages spoken in the Middle East, North Africa, and East Africa, which is a sub-group of the Afro-Asiatic family. With other Canaanite languages such as Phoenician and Ugaritic, and Aramaic languages, Biblical Hebrew developed within the Northwest-Semitic branch of the Semitic languages, and has evolved throughout the ages, with Modern Israeli Hebrew exhibiting characteristics that are significantly different from those of the ancient language. Biblical Hebrew is known to us primarily through the Hebrew Bible. The study of the language must assume that the primary focus of the Bible as a religious/didactic document left much of the lexicon of the language unaccounted for, and that the language as we know it is a formal language, probably quite different from the spoken Hebrew of the time. Biblical Hebrew existed as a spoken language for a period that extended from the 12th century B.C.E to the 5th century B.C.E. In the cour
