1. The Name and Literature
Hebrew is the usual
name of the language spoken by the Israelites up to
a few centuries before the birth of
Christ. The tongue which was spoken
or written by the learned later than
this, a somewhat
artificial continuation
of the earlier language, is called in
distinction the New Hebrew. The term
Hebrew
language is not in the Old Testament; it is found
first in the prologue to Ecclesiaaticus, then in
Josephus, and
afterward in the New Testament,
where, however, it denotes the Aramaic speech of
the Jews. Isa. xix.18 bas the phrase" the language
of Canaan,"
II Kings xviii. 26
and
Neh. xiii. 24
have
"the Jews' language" to express the tongue used
by the Hebrews of those times. In later times the
Jews called the Hebrew "the holy language." The
phrase "Hebrew language," therefore, goes back
not to
the Old Testament, but to the common designation "Hebrews" as the name of the people,
and is the equivalent of "the Israelitic tongue."
The Hebrew word `Ibri (Gen. x., id.), to which
"Hebrew" goes back, comprises a number of Arabic
and Aramaic stocks to which, among others, Terah
and Abraham belonged. Recent scholars see in the
term an appellative denoting " the people from the
other side " (of the river Euphrates--so Stade-or
of the Jordan). The Old Testament is the main
source of knowledge of this tongue, in which all of
it is written except Ears iv. 8-vi. 18, vii. 12-26,
Dan. ii. 4-vii.
28, Jer. x. il. Besides this are the
Siloam inscription, some inscribed- stones from.
Assyria, and Babylon, the coins of the
Maccabeans,
and the fragments of the Hebrew of Ecclesiasticus
(see
Apocrypha, A, IV., 12). The Moabitic Stone
may be reckoned here, since its language is practically identical with the Hebrew.
2. The Semitic Languages
This language belongs to a large family of languages to which, since the time of Eichhorn, the
name Semitic has been given, i.e., the
tongues of the descendants of Shem.
According to
Old Testament
usage,
this name is inexact, since some of the
people who used a language belonging
to this group were descendants of Ham. But no
thoroughly adequate name bas yet been found.
The relationship of the original Semitic speech to
others, e.g., the
Egyptian language, is yet an open
question. The nearest relatives of the Hebrew were
the Moabitic, practically identical with it, and the
Phenician. Doubtless the other peoples immediately east and west-of the Jordan spoke dialects
of the same tongue, so that this group may be called
the Cflnaanitic. A comparison of Phenician inacriptions
with the Hebrew shows divergent dialectic
peculiarities, while
Neh. xiii. 23-24
makes clear that
by the time of Nehemiah the dialects had become
so changed as not to be mutually intelligible to those
speaking them. Nearest to the Canaanitic group
came the Aramaic, the early
history of which is
obscure, but which developed a rich literature,
divided into the East and the West Aramaic. The
latter was used by the later inhabitants of Palestine
-Jews, Samaritans, and Christians-and by Nabataeana and Palinyrenes. The East Aramaic was
used by Babylonian Jews, Mandæans (q.v.), and the
people of Edema, the last developing a
considerable
Christian literature. The Aramaic tongues were
superseded by the Arabic. A third branch is the
South Semitic languages, including the Arabic,
Sabean, Mineean, Ethiopic, and Amharic. The
East Semitic group comprises the Aesprian-Babylonian of the cuneiform inscriptions.
