Hebrew

A Language Resurrected from History

Hebrew is a Northwest Semitic language and one of the oldest continuously documented languages in the world, with written records stretching back over 3,000 years. It is the language of the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, and centuries of Jewish religious scholarship, prayer, and poetry. What makes Hebrew uniquely remarkable in the history of human language is that it underwent a revival unlike anything ever seen before — a language that had ceased to be spoken natively for nearly two millennia was successfully revived as a living, everyday spoken language in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today it is the official language of the State of Israel and the mother tongue of millions of Israelis born long after that extraordinary revival took place.

From Biblical Roots to Modern Revival

Ancient Hebrew flourished as a spoken language in the Land of Israel until around the 2nd century CE, after which it gradually gave way to Aramaic and later Arabic as the dominant spoken tongues of the Jewish communities in the region. However, Hebrew never truly died — it continued to live as a written and liturgical language throughout the centuries, used in religious texts, rabbinic literature, poetry, and correspondence across Jewish communities from Spain to Poland to Yemen. The revival of Hebrew as a spoken language was largely driven by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a visionary linguist who emigrated to Palestine in 1881 and devoted his life to modernising and expanding the language, coining thousands of new words to equip ancient Hebrew for the demands of modern life.

Hebrew in the Modern World

Modern Hebrew, known in Hebrew as Ivrit, is the official language of Israel and is spoken by approximately nine million people. It serves as the primary language of government, education, media, literature, and daily life in Israel, and is also understood and spoken by Jewish communities around the world as a second or heritage language. Modern Hebrew retains the same alphabet, grammatical structure, and much of the vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew, while incorporating thousands of new words drawn from Arabic, Yiddish, English, and other languages that Jewish communities encountered throughout their long diaspora. The result is a language that is simultaneously ancient and vibrantly contemporary.

A Script Read from Right to Left

Hebrew is written in the Hebrew alphabet, known as the Aleph-Bet, which consists of 22 letters — all consonants. Like Arabic, Hebrew is written and read from right to left. Vowels are not represented by letters in the standard alphabet but are instead indicated by a system of dots and dashes written above and below the consonants, known as nikud. In everyday modern Hebrew writing — newspapers, books, signs, and digital communication — the vowel marks are almost always omitted, and readers are expected to infer the correct vowels from context and familiarity with the language. Vowelised text is typically reserved for children's books, poetry, and religious scripture.