what language did abraham speak

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.

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.

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.

[8] Canon Rawlinson writes (Ancient Monarchies, vol. 1, p. 55); "The subjects of the early Kings [of Chaldea] are continually designated on the inscriptions by the title of Kiprat-arbat , 'The four nations,' or Arba-lisun , 'The four tongues.' In Abraham's time, again, the league of four kings seems correspondent to a fourfold ethnic division - Cushite, Turanian, Semitic, and Arian, the chief authority and ethnic preponderance being with the Cushites. ... So that it is at least probable that the 'four tongues' intended were not mere local dialects, but distinct languages, the representatives respectively of the four great families of human speech."

"And Jehovah said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous, I will go down now and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know." He is speaking here just after the manner of men. Jehovah adopts the familiar language of common life, and deigns to adapt Himself to that which every one could understand in a man. It is wholly above our comprehension how God knows all things at once, without inquiry or investigation. He condescends here to speak so that Abraham might be thoroughly free in His presence.