What is Biblical Hebrew? Why was the Old Testament written in Hebrew?

Again, we would call attention to the languages chosen, by which to convey the thoughts of God, as an additional proof that what was written, and so carefully selected, was for man's use and guidance. In Hebrew, Chaldee, and Greek, has the Spirit of God been pleased to write. He spake by the disciples, on the day of Pentecost, in many different tongues. In three only has He written what, it pleased God we should be acquainted with. To them must we turn, if we would learn the exact sayings of the Spirit about the Son of God, about man, about the world, the final destiny of the human race, and the earth on which we tread. And each of these languages, when employed, was just the best medium that could have been found, by which to publish far and wide the acts and purposes of God. Hebrew, the language of Palestine, as the names of places and people, before Israel possessed it, indicate the adopted language of Abraham and his descendants, as the difference between the language of Jacob and that of Laban, the Mesopotamian, clearly shows (Gen. 31:47.) Hebrew was also the language of commerce, the Phoenicians being the great carriers of the world in their days. Westward, along the Mediterranean to the far off Islands of the Cassiterides they penetrated, Eastward, down the Red Sea, along the Eastern Coast of Africa, and to India they found their way. The navies of Solomon, too, in the days of Israel's greatest glory, went to Ophir. By such means, the knowledge of the Hebrew tongue must have been extended beyond the confines of Canaan, and so an opportunity have been afforded of letting men, of different nations, speaking languages of different families from the Semitic, hear something of the wonders and truth of that God who, was worshipped in such splendour at Jerusalem as Jehovah God of Hosts. How far, through the faithlessness of Israel, this result fell short of what might have been, we have not now to inquire. We have only to do with the fact that God chose this language, in which, for 1100 years, with only a brief interval, He communicated His thoughts to men. Was it a mere accident, as men would say, that Hebrew was the language selected; was it not rather from design? For what other tongue could have answered the end so well? Abraham gave up his native tongue for the language of Canaan; but God was by this preparing for that time, when His word should not only be written on tables of stone, or altars, in Canaan, so that Israel could understand it, but be recorded in that tongue, some knowledge of this must have extended, as names of places to this day testify, wherever the great merchants of Tyre and Sidon penetrated with their wares.

What we have said about the New Testament will apply equally to the Old. Hebrew is far simpler, and therefore not so difficult a language as the Greek. Yet it is the divinely-chosen medium of inspiration for the Old Testament. The very language is itself pictorial, or typical, and is therefore appropriate to the times of type and shadow. It is a most beautiful language, which, with a marked simplicity, is also sufficiently flexible to express profound emotions. It would, however, scarcely lend itself to the delicacies and shades of meaning, for instance, of the Gospel of John or the epistles of Paul. The Greek is perhaps the most perfect vehicle in existence for the expression of abstract truth; but in Old Testament days, while the time for this abstract statement had not come, the Hebrew, by its very simplicity and pictorial character, is peculiarly adapted to its own special use.

The Old Testament is the collection of books, written almost entirely in Hebrew, which have come down to us from the ancient Jews and the first Christians, stamped with Jewish reception and New Testament citation. Hebrew, by us the most cherished of what since the time of Eichhorn has been called the Semitic family of languages, may be called the mother-tongue of the Israelites, which they derived from the Patriarchs. Abram, if we may judge by comparative philology combined with the words of a Prophet, would seem when he entered the land to have adopted the 'language of Canaan' (Isa. 19:18),which would thus become the Hebrew language. He would have the less difficulty in doing so if, as seems probable, it were a Semitic dialect. There is no indication of Abram's having employed an interpreter in Canaan, as his descendants at a later period were obliged to do in Egypt (Gen. 42:23). Renan gives as examples of Canaanite names of men or towns, being pure Hebrew, Abimelech, Adoni-bezek, Kirjath-sepher, Kirjath-jearim. Munk includes Melchisedek in his list. The Hebrews do not seem even to have translated names, but sometimes changed them: see Num. 32:38. Such oft-recurring words as God in the form El, of Baal, king, priest, sacrifice, pillar, are Canaanitish or Phoenician. The usual language of Laban, possibly akin to the mother-tongue of Abram himself, who was however a native of Babylonia, was not Hebrew, but Aramaic. This appears from Gen. 31:47. Renan makes Hebrew the language also of the old stock, but only by treating this passage as unhistorical. The 'Chaldee,' which has come down to us as the original Text of Ezra 4:8 - 6:18, and Ezra 7:12-26, Daniel 2:4 - 7:28, and Jeremiah 10:11, by mistake called 'Syriac' in the A.V. of Dan. 2:4, was the language the Jews of the Captivity brought with them from Babylon; it is another of the Aramaic dialects, and must not be confounded with the language of the Chaldeans spoken of in Dan. 1:4. This Chaldee seems to have been a principal ingredient in the vernacular of Palestine in the time of our Lord, though in the New Testament called 'The Hebrew dialect,' because spoken by Hebrew, as distinct from Hellenist or Greek-speaking Jews. The 'holy nation,' then, began and, in a sense, ended with a language not that of the long period during which it rightly took its place before the rest of the nations as the people of God. We shall resume the consideration of the history of the Hebrew language in a separate chapter.

Most probably this was the language of Canaan, before Abraham came into it. For we observe that his relatives on the other side of the Euphrates spoke another tongue (Gen. 31:47), and in the narrative of the intercourse between the Hebrews and the people of the land, there is no allusion to any difference of speech. Then again, the names of places in Canaan, from the very earliest times, have all a meaning in Hebrew but not in any other language; and in the few existing records of the dialect of the idolatrous part of the land, as in the Phoenician, on coins discovered at Tyre, and Malta; and in the daughter of the Phoenician, namely the Punic or Carthaginian, preserved in a Latin comedy of Plautus (Poenulus v. 1, 2), we find a form of speech identical with the Hebrew. And lastly, indigenous to a country place like Palestine, the same word is used to denote both Sea and West.

In this language, the whole of the Old Testament is written, with the exception of parts of the Books of Ezra and Daniel. And it is remarked how little change the language underwent during the thousand years over which the composition of the book extended. This is due to the natural inflexibility of the language itself; the isolation of the people from the rest of the world; the influence of the Pentateuch in fixing it; and the general belief in its sacredness. For these reasons, the language of Moses is substantially the same as that of Malachi, in spite of some antique phrases in the former, and the gradually increasing admixture of Syrian with all the writers that succeeded Isaiah.

The Hebrew died out, as a spoken language, at, or soon after the Babylonish captivity, and was replaced by the Syrian or Aramaic, which was the language of their conquerors, the Assyrians and Babylonians. This was the language in which Eliakim begged Rab-shakeh to speak to the people in Jerusalem, because they did not understand it, as the chiefs themselves did. It seems clear therefore that the language of Syria began to penetrate Israel after this time; and, when the Jews remained for two generations in Babylon, they must have lost, nearly, if not entirely, all recollection of their former speech. For Ezra seems to have interpreted the words of the Law to them, on their return. (Neh. 8:8) While yet from the fact of Zechariah, Haggai, and Malachi, continuing to write in Hebrew, we may conclude it had not quite disappeared; as we know it had a little later at the time of Alexander's conquests.

Nobody doubts that scripture without exception has a human element. In it God speaks and writes permanently to man, and therefore in human language. It were unintelligible otherwise. As the general rule Hebrew was employed in the so-called O.T., Greek in the New. We can readily perceive His wisdom in thus writing by man to man (Deut. 5:22, Deut. 9:10, Deut. 10:4), save in the most solemnly exceptional case: the law with all its variety of meaning in the language of His ancient people; the gospel with all the fulness of grace and truth in the chief tongue of the Gentiles.

Biblia. This name is from the Greek through the Latin, and signifies 'The Books.' The whole is also called 'The Scriptures,' and once 'The Holy Scriptures,' that is, 'the Sacred Writings,' distinguishing them from all others. The advent of the Lord Jesus, who was the great subject of the scriptures, John 5:39, and in whom as 'Son' God spoke, after a silence of 400 years, naturally led to a division of the sacred writings into two parts, called the Old and New Testaments. The 'Old Testament' is mentioned as being read in 2 Cor. 3:14; but the term 'New Testament,' as applied to the collection of books that commonly bear that title, does not occur in scripture. There was also a change in the language in which the various books of the two Testaments were written. The Old was written in Hebrew, except Ezra 4:8 to Ezra 6:18; Ezra 7:12-26; Jer. 10:11; Dan. 2:4 to Dan. 7:28: these portions being written in Chaldee or Aramaic. The books of the New Testament were written in Greek (without now taking into consideration whether the Gospel by Matthew was originally written in Aramaic). The glad tidings of salvation was for the whole world, and the language most extensively known at that time was chosen for its promulgation.

The Hebrew, called the sacred tongue, because in it nearly all the Old Testament is written, seems to have been spoken in a comparatively small district; perhaps only in Palestine, Phoenicia, and the immediate neighbourhood. It is called Hebrew, because it was the language of the people of that name; and they appear to have been so designated, from Heber; who being the last patriarch, before the dispersion from Babel, must have possessed an authority (as speaking to an undivided people) which no succeeding patriarch could have had.

The term Hebrew language does not, however, occur in the Old Testament. There it is called the language of the Jews, as at 2 Kings 18:26, or the lip of Canaan, as at Isaiah 19:18.

The Hebrew language, common to the Jews. Rab-shakeh was asked to speak in the Syrian language (the Aramaic); but he, wishing the people of Jerusalem to understand him, spoke in Hebrew. 2 Kings 18:28; Neh. 13:21; Isa. 36:13.

91 We have seen how the world was settled, and, after Noah has gone from the scene, the nations divided, and the fact of God's judgment confounding their language. The languages we know come, I believe, from Sanskrit or Zend. Latin and Greek, they say, were sister languages, and not mother and daughter (and they call them now Aryan), and all the languages of Europe except the Basque, and so all the northern languages of India. Then there is the Shemitic and that class of languages, the Turanian, the North American languages having been Shemitic made up since. Scythian or Assyrian they cannot read yet. They have made out the Shemitic and Aryan, but not the Turanian. Such are the great roots of what has covered the world.

There was nothing to hinder Moses from speaking Hebrew: the Jews all spoke it among themselves. It is a very child's tongue, not an elaborately formed language at all. Besides, God may have made him know it perfectly. They have found an inscription put up by Mesha, king of Moab, the sheep-master, in an old Phoenician character. The Samaritans still keep nearly the same. When the Jews came back from Babylon, they had only the present Hebrew characters.

Hours with the Hebrew Bible The same may be said, with perhaps less emphasis, of the study of the Hebrew Scriptures. The very Hebrew language is a type. Its very structure is pictorial, and it revels in the imagery so common to the children of the East. This, God has used as the vehicle for the expression of His revealed truth, in a typical and anticipative way.