Whenever a curious non-Jew enters a synagogue for the first time, one of the most striking parts is the strangeness of Hebrew. It is read right to left and the letters are completely foreign. It looks more than just ancient, it looks arcane. Hebrew is full of sounds not found in American English and the chanted prayers come from a very different time and place. But Hebrew really isn't as strange, or as foreign, as it first seems. Let's break down some bits of history to show how Hebrew really isn't that far removed from the languages we know in the West.

Hebrew didn't develop in isolation. In fact, it's one of most-traveled tongues in the world. It belongs to a linguistic super-family called the Afro-Asiatic languages. The vast majority of European languages come from a super-family known as Indo-European. The Hebrew we see in the Torah is Classical Hebrew, which itself is fairly close to Modern Hebrew. To put things in historical context, 2000 years ago the version of Hebrew spoken in Judea was called Aramaic, but Classical Hebrew had already come to be adopted for ritual purposes. The two languages are very close. Aramaic was really more of an everyday spoken language.

Long before even Classical Hebrew when the Jewish culture was in its early stages of development, those people who would become the Hebrews likely wrote and spoke Proto-Canaanite, the language of the loose amalgamation of peoples in the region of Canaan near the dawn of human civilization. Proto-Canaanite was a pictograph system, meaning that the symbols that later became associated with specific sounds began representing whole concepts. For example, the original pictograph for the letter Alef resembles the head of a bull and was meant to indicate strength or leadership.

From Proto-Canaanite, a more directly phonetic alphabet developed in the Phoenecian language. The region of Phoenecia was, like many parts of the world at that time, arranged as a series of independent city-states rather than a unified kingdom. To run with our example, the letter Alef transformed into the following shape:

It's easy to see how this letter, like so much of the Phoenician alphabet, influenced the Greek language, which is the origin of the letter Alpha, itself being functionally identical to the modern letter A. This is because Greek informed Etruscan and Etruscan developed into Latin. Today, we anglophones use the Roman Latin Alphabet.

Even the term "Alphabet" comes from the first two letters in that system stemming from Proto-Canaanite, "Alef" and "Bet". Even the progression of Western letters follows the the same progression as Hebrew. Where the Greek runs- Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, etc., Hebrew runs- Alef, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, etc.

This is how languages develop; not in a vacuum, but as a confluence of cross-cultural communication. There are even a few Hebrew words that snuck their way into English. One that comes to mind is the word Sabbatical, meaning an extended period of vacation from one's work. This comes from the Hebrew term "Shabbat", which means Sabbath, and comes from the Hebrew verb Lishavet meaning "To rest".

So, no matter how strange and foreign Hebrew may seem to a lifelong English-speaker, the two languages share a common history, as do the majority of the languages spoken on planet Earth today.