A Brief History of Hebrew

The Hebrew language dates back to the late Bronze Age, around 2000 BCE. The most ancient form of Hebrew still in use today is called Biblical Hebrew. This is the Hebrew of the Tanakh, commonly known as the Hebrew Bible. As Jews migrated into the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, Hebrew largely died out as a spoken language. This migration created what we call the Jewish Diaspora.

In their everyday lives, generations of diaspora Jews spoke Hebrew-influenced variations of the languages around them. Jews in the Middle East and North Africa spoke Judeo-Arabic, Jews in Eastern Europe spoke Yiddish, Jews in the Iberian Peninsula spoke Ladino, and so on. These languages are not Hebrew, though they may be written in Hebrew letters. Many diasporic Jewish languages still have thriving communities today, while others are endangered.

For centuries, rabbis and scholars were the driving force behind the preservation and innovation of Hebrew. This era is called Rabbinic Hebrew, and its evolution can be traced from the Talmud, starting around 300 CE, to many of the songs, prayers, and poems that make up modern Jewish liturgy, written in the Medieval period, ending around 1600 CE.

The Jews of Ottoman Palestine in the 19th and early 20th century spoke Hebrew in their daily lives. Around the same time, a literary and religious Hebrew revival movement took Jewish communities in Europe by storm. Jews who spoke different languages, had different Hebrew accents, and different religious and political beliefs clashed and melded, ushering in the era of Modern Hebrew, the language that is primarily spoken in Israel/Palestine today. Each of these eras of Hebrew has a distinct grammatical structure, uses different loanwords from different languages, and may be pronounced differently depending on the speaker’s cultural lineage. The Nonbinary Hebrew Project does not claim to have a universal answer for every question about every possible variation of Hebrew. We are part of the legacy of a living language, and we encourage everyone to experiment as they see fit.