Category: Hebrew language

In this article we are going to talk about another frequently asked question: What is the difference between Hebrew and Aramaic languages?

As a simple starting point, it should be clear that: These are two different languages. Hebrew is one language, Aramaic is another.

Hebrew is the language of the Hebrews.

Aramaic is the language of the Arameans.

The book of Genesis speaks of a man who was called Shem (or Sem), from whom the Semites are descendant.

Shem had two sons, one named Heber and another named Aram.

From Heber came the Hebrews, and the Hebrew language.

From Aram came the Arameans, and the Aramaic language.

The Hebrew people are well known to all, they are also the people of Israel.

The Arameans, the sons of Aram, were a people who lived in the region of Syria. The country called “Aram” in the Hebrew biblical text, is translated into Western languages as “Syria“.

The language of the Arameans, the Aramaic, ended up taking over the entire Middle East region in the ancient world.

Nowadays the predominant language in the Middle East is Arabic. In the past, it was Aramaic.

With a numerous variety of dialects, Aramaic was spoken by the Babylonians, Syrians, Assyrians, and all the nations in that region. Even the Jews, after the Babylonian exile, ended up adopting a Jewish Babylonian Aramaic dialect, and no longer speaking Hebrew.

Aramaic and Hebrew are distinct but similar languages. They can be compared as distant relatives, just like English and Dutch.

If you are American, British, or from another English speaking country, even if you don’t speak Dutch, you can recognize similarities in the language, because they are both dialects of low German. They are “sister” languages.

This comparison is also valid for Hebrew and Aramaic. This languages are both descendant from the same root, and they are considered to be sister languages. Perhaps not as similar as other sister languages around the globe, but their similarities cannot be ignored.

Nowadays, Hebrew is the official language of the state of Israel, and is spoken by Israelis.

Aramaic, on the other hand, although it is not the official language of a specific country, contrary to what some may think, it is also not a dead language. It is still spoken as a native language by several villages and traditional communities in the Middle East region. But, there are, in fact, several different dialects of the language, so a group of Aramaic speakers may not always understand a different group of speakers, due to its dialectical differences.

Aramaic is also used as a liturgical language by many Christians in the Middle East, in churches of Syriac tradition, and it also appears in some parts of the Jewish liturgy, such as the famous “Kadish” prayer, which is done entirely in Aramaic. It is also the language of the Talmud, an important Jewish literature.

But after all, in what language was the Bible written? In Hebrew or Aramaic?

The Hebrew Bible, known in Judaism as “Tanach”, and in Christianity as “Old Testament”, was written almost entirely in Hebrew, as the name itself says.

But a few minor parts are an exception. Only a small number of chapters of the book of Daniel and the book of Ezra were written in Aramaic.

An important note is that the Aramaic used today is usually written with the Syriac alphabet, which looks very different from the Hebrew alphabet.

But the Aramaic used in Jewish literature, including the Hebrew Bible, is written with the Hebrew alphabet. This means that anyone who knows how to read the Hebrew letters is also able to read the biblical texts in Aramaic of the books of Daniel and Ezra. And whoever understands Hebrew, may also understand a considerable number of these texts in Aramaic.

Knowing Hebrew, it is not so difficult to learn the meaning of the Aramaic texts from the book of Daniel and Ezra. After all, there are just a few chapters to study.

The difference between Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew

December 17, 2020

jonathan-frate

Hebrew language 4 Comments

A question I often get asked is the difference between Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew.

First, we must know that whether biblical or modern, we are talking about the same language. They are not different or separate languages. But then what is the difference between them?

In order to simplify, let’s discuss about the two basic points of differentiation of this variants: the time and the application of it.

The time

Biblical Hebrew was the language used in the ancient world, about three thousand years ago. It was spoken in the land of Israel in biblical times.

Modern Hebrew is the language used in Israel nowadays.

As the world changes, also the languages evolve. All languages are susceptible to transformations across time. Do you think that a thousand years ago people spoke English the same way as we speak today? Certainly they have some differences, although they are still the same language.

What are the changes that may occur in a language?

The first change that may occur is the emergence of new words. Any modern language has far more words than its predecessor had in the past.

Today we need to talk about computers, phones, airplanes, cars, electricity, and a million more things that didn’t exist in the past.

Therefore Modern Hebrew speaks of things that did not exist in biblical times. There is a need to express more complex ideas.

The second change that may happen is the simplification of some linguistic structures, such as spelling, pronunciation rules and grammatical syntax. These structures can be replaced by other simpler models present in other known languages.

In the English language there were several changes in spelling, for an example the word “queen” used to be written as “cwen” in old English.

In the other hand, Hebrew did not undergo significant changes in spelling (although there were changes in the pictographic Hebrew script, as we saw in the article regarding the alphabet).

But there are some complicated structures in verbal language that were replaced by more “practical” ways of grammar or in some way a more colloquial speech. For example, the declension of words to form the possessive is replaced by the use of a preposition that indicates the possessive form. This avoids the need of “declining” the words all the time. Also, some forms of more complex verb conjugations are not commonly used.

Example:

הסוסים

“Hassussim”

Meaning “the horses“.

In Modern Hebrew, if I mean

“the horses of David“, I say:

הסוסים של דויד

“Hassussim shel David“,

the “shel” being the equivalent of “of” in English.

Now in classical Hebrew, to say

“the horses of David” would be like this:

סוסי דויד

“Sussei David“.

Although it got shorter, I needed to change the word “Hassussim” in to “Sussei“.

The birth of Modern Hebrew

A different interesting fact occurred with Hebrew evolution in comparison to English or other languages, its changes did not come through a natural process of transformation by its speakers over the last centuries.

The Hebrew language went many years without being spoken as a living language; it had already become a “dead” language. It was just a language for Bible study, literature and liturgy.

In the passage between the 19th and 20th century the language was resurrected, rebuilt from Biblical Hebrew, mainly by the work of the linguist named Eliezer ben Yehuda. After his work, new words of the modern world were created and added to the resurrect idiom, and Hebrew became the official language of Israel.

The application

We have already said that, the first difference between Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew is the time. They are both the same language but at different moments of time, so you can see that there are some differences between them.

The second thing we are going to talk about is the application. For what reasons should I learn Modern Hebrew or biblical Hebrew? What are they used for?

Modern Hebrew is the language used today for any purpose, whether in colloquial conversation, watching television, using the internet, or in a formal speech; whether in the writing of a newspaper, a scientific article, a gossip magazine, or a book on any subject, including modern literary works.

Whoever studies Modern Hebrew aims to communicate in the language in all ways, that is, to talk, speak, listen, write and read any modern texts.

Now Biblical Hebrew, in fact, is not simply the Hebrew that was spoken 3,000 years ago, but it is a literary language.

Biblical Hebrew is the language of 3,000 years ago that was used in sacred literature.

It was not the colloquial language used in people’s daily lives. It was the cultured language of the time. The Biblical text, although simple, is a text of a literary character, which has art and erudition, whether in poetry or prose.

No, people did not speak with erudition at that time. They had their colloquial language, their regionalisms, their “slang”, and different ways of speaking in different social groups and contexts.

But to write sacred texts, a literary language was used.

Therefore, studying Biblical Hebrew is not simply studying ancient Hebrew, but studying a language used in a specific literature, which is the Biblical text.

Studying Biblical Hebrew is studying a fully applied and specific literary language. The purpose of studying Biblical Hebrew is to read the Bible in Hebrew.

Summarizing…

For practical terms: If your goal is to converse in Hebrew, to live in Israel, and to read current texts, you need to study Modern Hebrew. You need to learn the modern vocabulary, the everyday language, and focus mainly on conversation.

But if your goal is to read the Bible in its original language, you need to learn Biblical Hebrew, which is the literary language of the Bible, and then your focus will not be on conversation, but on reading texts.

But the good news is that to start your studies for both for Biblical Hebrew and for Modern, the path is one: you need to learn how to read, and the writing is the same.

By learning to read in Hebrew, you will be able to study both the Biblical and the modern, or both, with the difference that in Modern Hebrew you will soon have to read without vowels, while in the Biblical you will not necessarily need to worry about it. But believe me, reading without vowels is easier than you think, as you start to know the language, you will naturally identify the words.

The difference between Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew

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The Hebrew Alphabet

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The Hebrew vowels

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The Hebrew vowels

December 17, 2020

jonathan-frate

Hebrew language 2 Comments

Hebrew vowels are represented by signs that are not part of the alphabet. In fact, vowels are not originally written in Hebrew language (they are pronounced, but not written).

However, at some point a solution was created to this barrier, that is, the absence of vowels, which could have jeopardized the preservation of the Hebrew language and the original biblical text. In this article you will understand how the Hebrew vowel signs work, what they are and how they came to be.

How is it to read a text without vowels

In the previous article we talked about the Hebrew alphabet. We saw that the Hebrew letters were created to represent sounds, but only consonants sounds (except in some special cases).

Making an analogy, if we take the verses of Genesis 1: 1 and 2, of the example of the previous article, and write them in English without vowels, as it is in Hebrew, it would look something like this:

“IN TH BGINNNG GD CRTD TH HVNS AND TH ERTH. NW TH ERTH WS FRMLSS AND EMPTY, DRKNSS WS OVR TH SURFC OF TH DP AND TH SPRT OF GD WS HVRNG OVR TH WTRS”.

It would be a little difficult to read, especially for someone who doesn’t speak English. This is exactly what happens in Hebrew. Words are written without vowels, and only those who can speak the language fluently can read it correctly.

For those beginning to learn to read Hebrew it would be very difficult – in fact quite impossible, to pronounce the words correctly.

There was a time when Hebrew was no longer a language spoken. Jews lived in many countries around the world, and hardly anyone spoke the language fluently.

Hebrew became a “liturgical” language; it was used only in prayers, songs and readings in the synagogue. It was already getting difficult for most people to be able to read the Torah in Hebrew, because nobody knew how to pronounce it properly, only the most educated people.

The Masoretes

Finally, a group of scribes, called Masoretes, who knew the Hebrew language and the biblical text very well, took action to preserve the pronunciation of the Hebrew and the correct understanding of the biblical scriptures. This occurred more or less around the sixth century.

They decided to create signs to represent the Hebrew vowels. They didn’t create new letters, so as not to alter the original writing of the words; they just added these signs, which were dots and dashes around the words. These signs are called “Nekudot” (dots), or Masoretic signs.

A sign was created for each vowel and they were placed on the existing letters. Thus, the pronunciation of the sacred texts, and consequently the Hebrew language, were preserved, and people who did not know how to speak fluently began to be able to read the texts with ease.

Imagine now how that English text used as an analogy would look like with added small symbols that represent vowels. Could look something like this:

“IN TH_e B_eGINN_iNG G_oD CR_eaT_eD TH_e H_eaV_eNS AND TH_e E_aRTH. N_oW TH_e E_aRTH W_aS F_oRML_eSS AND EMPTY, D_aRKN_eSS W_aS OV_eR TH_e SURF_aC_e OF TH_e D_eeP AND TH_e SP_iR_iT OF G_oD W_aS H_oV_eR_iNG OV_eR TH_e W_aT_eRS”.

Now it’s much easier to read. Anyone who is not a native English speaker could learn to read a text like this. All vowels are written – they look different, but they are there.

Finally the writing of the Hebrew vowels – the “Nekudot”

The signs of the Hebrew vowels created by Masoretes are as follows:

Note that each vowel has two different ways of representing: One is called a long vowel, and the other is a short vowel.

Very strict grammatical rules were created to make this notation. But in practical terms, nowadays there is no difference in pronunciation between these short and long vowels.

The two A’s have the same pronunciation, the two E’s have the same pronunciation, the two I’s have the same pronunciation, the two O’s have the same pronunciation and the two U’s have the same pronunciation.

In other words, to learn to read, you don’t have to worry about long and short vowels, just to learn the two different symbols that represent each vowel.

These signs have names, but there is absolutely no need to know these names for you to learn to read in Hebrew.

Just out of curiosity, or in case you want to know, these are the names of the Nekudot – the signs of the Hebrew vowels:

We have yet another sign, which is called “Sh’va”, which are two points, one bellow the other, which is placed under the letter. This sign represents that the consonant has no vowel, or sometimes, depending on the situation, it may have an E sound as well.

Three of the vowel signs can also appear with an addition of the two points on the side (the “sh’va”); forming what is called a “semivowel” – which, again, does not interfere with anything in the pronunciation – is just a grammatical detail.

ֲ a

ֱ e

ֳ o

In the Torah scrollsְ, which are scrolls still traditionally handwritten and used in synagogues, the vowels also do not appear. The text appears in the traditional way.

However, in printed Hebrew Bibles, vowels will always be there to help.

If you want to learn to read in Hebrew, you can start right now by watching the first lesson in the series of 11 lessons I prepared, where I teach step by step, in a very practical and simple way, to read each syllable. Watch the first lesson here, and start learning to read and write in Hebrew.

The difference between Hebrew and Aramaic

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The difference between Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew

A question I often get asked is the difference between Biblical Hebrew and Modern Hebrew. First, we must know that whether biblical or modern, we

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The Hebrew vowels

Hebrew vowels are represented by signs that are not part of the alphabet. In fact, vowels are not originally written in Hebrew language (they are

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The Hebrew Alphabet

December 17, 2020

jonathan-frate

Hebrew language 2 Comments

The Hebrew language is written with an alphabet quite different from the one we use in English. The “alef-beit”, as the Hebrew alphabet is known, consists of the 22 letters that are used to write the Hebrew words.

The English language, as well as other Western languages, such as Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, etc., is written with the Latin alphabet, which was used by the Romans to write their language, Latin. The Latin alphabet was eventually adopted by all these modern languages, including English.

But before the Latin alphabet existed, there were already several other forms of writing systems, used in many languages around the world.

To better understand the origin of the Hebrew alphabet, let’s understand a little about the origin of writing, and the history of the alphabets.

A little about the history of writing

When writing was invented, people initially created symbols to represent ideas or words.

For example, ancient Egyptian script, or even Chinese script and parts of the Japanese script, which are still used today, were invented to work as follows:

Each symbol represents a word, or an idea. This means that for each word, you would need to learn a different symbol or combination.

To write “tree”, for example, you would learn a symbol that would represent a tree. To write dog, you would have a symbol for the dog. Love, happiness, justice, heaven, earth, man, woman… each word would possess a symbol.

It is like a child’s game, but this was more or less the idea used to create phonetic writing.

The first phonetic alphabets were invented by the Semitic peoples. They would have adapted the complicated Egyptian “drawings”, transforming them into simple phonetic writing. This Semitic phonetic writing is called “Proto-Sinaitic” script, because it was discovered in the Sinai region.

From this original Semitic alphabet, which looked more like Egyptian drawings, several alphabets came out.

As time went by, these letters were modified.

Let’s go back to our example of the alphabet you invented for English, and imagine again the “monkey” you drew.

Over the generations, people found your “monkey” somewhat picturesque, complicated, perhaps even too childish or naive. Nobody wanted to draw a monkey over and over in the middle of a text, or to read texts full of animal drawings. Then people started to modify the monkey design you had invented, until it became a totally different symbol, which would represent the “m” sound, but which would have nothing more to do with the original monkey design.

(The monkey is just an example; it has nothing to do with the origin of the letter “m” in any language).

From Proto-Sinaitic “drawings” to the present

From that “Proto-Sinaitic” alphabet, still with drawings similar to Egyptian script, several alphabets emerged, such as the famous Phoenician alphabet, the Aramaic alphabet and the Hebrew alphabet.

The Hebrew alphabet was formerly still written differently than what we know today. This older form of the Hebrew alphabet is called the “Paleo-Hebrew” alphabet, which is more like the Phoenician alphabet.

After the time of the Babylonian exile, the Jews began to write the letters most similar to the Aramaic alphabet, which are more similar to the current Hebrew alphabet.

The Dead Sea scrolls, which are the oldest known Hebrew Bible manuscripts, from the 2nd century BC, are written in letters much more similar to the ones we use today.

All of these Hebrew alphabets are actually composed of the same letters, with the same names and the same sounds, but “drawn” differently.

The way Hebrew is written today is called the “Square script”.

Anyway, this is the Hebrew alphabet as we know it today:

A “little” detail

But… going back to the phonetic alphabet invented by the Semites, it had some limitations: it only represented consonants (with few exceptions in some cases). The vowels you would have to deduce by the word. So is the Modern Hebrew alphabet.

Imagine that the English language was written like this:

“IN TH BGINNNG GD CRTD TH HVNS AND TH ERTH. NW TH ERTH WS FRMLSS AND EMPTY, DRKNSS WS OVR TH SURFC OF TH DP AND TH SPRT OF GD WS HVRNG OVR TH WTRS”.

The idea is more or less like this.

Can you read the text above?

Probably yes, because you know the English language well, and possibly also know this text. You can “guess” the vowels, because you know the words.

But someone who doesn’t know English would never have a clue how to pronounce these words.

This is how they created the Hebrew alphabet, and the other Semitic alphabets.

After all, their idea was that someone who is going to read a language necessarily knows how to speak that language.

Only later did other Peoples invent other alphabets with vowels, like the Greek alphabet and the Latin alphabet, which you know well.

But as for Hebrew, you would have to know the language to be able to read.

The solution

It turns out that there was a time when Hebrew was no longer spoken in everyday life. Most Jews no longer knew how to speak Hebrew, but used it in liturgy, prayers, and reading Torah.

Then the problem arises: How could someone who cannot speak Hebrew fluently read words whose vowels should be “guessed”?

How could you, today, who cannot speak Hebrew and intend to learn, learn to read?

For this reason, there came a time when the Jews created special signs, in addition to letters, to represent vowels. Someone had the idea of adding the vowels in the Hebrew texts, so that the pronunciation was not lost, and anyone could read.

In the next article, we will talk about exactly this, about the Hebrew vowels.

Another important detail: Hebrew is written from right to left, exactly the opposite of English and other Western languages.

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