II.

Biblical Hebrew

The language in which most of the Old Testament was written dates, as a living language, from the 12th to the 2nd century bc, at the latest. The territory of Phoenicia adjoined Canaan, and it is probable that Hebrew in its earliest form was almost identical to Phoenician; of the closely related Hebrew and Phoenician language groups, however, Hebrew is decidedly the more important. From about the 3rd century bc the Jews in Palestine came to use Aramaic in both speech and secular writings. Jews outside Palestine spoke in the language of the countries in which they had settled. Hebrew was preserved, however, as the language of ritual and sacred writing and through the centuries has undergone periodic literary revivals.

The original Hebrew alphabet consisted only of consonants (See also Semitic Languages) vowel signs and pronunciation currently accepted for biblical Hebrew were created by scholars known as Masoretes after the 5th century ad. These scholars are thought also to have standardized various dialectal differences.

The vocabulary of biblical Hebrew is small. Concrete adjectives are used for abstract nouns. The paucity of particles, which connect and relate ideas, and the limitation to two verb tenses (perfect and imperfect) cause an ambiguity regarding time concepts; various syntactic devices were employed to clarify relations of time. A past action was indicated by the first in a series of verbs being in the perfect tense and all following verbs in the imperfect; for present or future action the first verb is in the imperfect tense and all subsequent ones in the perfect.