Judeo Talk

Last week’s Hebrew lesson began our look into the history of the language and the people who spoke it. Today, we’ll be exploring where the term “Hebrew” itself originates.

When discussing the term “Hebrew” in reference to the language, there are actually three separate words we need to understand: Hebrew, Yihudit, and Ivrit.

We’ll begin with “Yihudit” because the other two terms are much more closely related. “Yihudit” is a word that means, “The language of Yihudah”, while the term “Yihudah” refers to the kingdom of Judah. In the ancient territory that we know today as the modern State of Israel, there were actually two presiding kingdoms. In the north was the ancient kingdom of Israel, which had the kingdom of Judah at its southern border. When the Roman Empire came to dominate the region, they latinized the name of the territory into Judea. This is where the terms “Judaism” and “Jewish” come from. The people who lived in Judah would have said they spoke “Yihudit”, as naming languages based on the regions in which they were spoken was the linguistic convention of ancient Hebrew speakers.

The terms “Ivrit” and “Hebrew” are related both linguistically and in spirit. “Ivrit” comes from the root word “Avar” which refers to someone who comes from far away. It should be noted that this is distinct from the words referring specifically to foreigners. The Hebrew word “Goi’im” is the most direct translation of “foreign people” and became the modern Yiddish term “Goyim” which refers to all non-Jewish people. In addition, there was an ancient Canaanite slang term for foreigners, “Gidolim” which literally translates as “Big ones”. This is where the story of David and Goliath comes from. Goliath originally wasn’t a giant, but a foreign leader.

The “far away” to which “Avar” refers is actually closer in spirit of the word “Hebrew”. That word can be traced to many similar iterations in various ancient Near and Middle Eastern cultures. Many Near Eastern cultures, like Sumeria, Akkad and Babylon had the term “Ibiru”, while the Egyptians adopted the word into their Coptic language as “Ipiru”. These words essentially indicate a people who live outside the cities. They often get referenced as the people who live on the other side of the river, which had a similar connotation as the modern colloquial term “People from the wrong side of the tracks”. At the time of its regular use, “Ibiru” didn’t necessarily refer to a particular ethnic group, but to a certain variety of ancient civilization. People called “Ibiru” weren’t really seen as being foreigners because they weren’t from a particular kingdom or city-state. Many of them were nomadic and tribal. Those people who would eventually become the dominant ethnic group in Canaan were known as being “Ibiru” in the lands in which they previously dwelt.

Ultimately, this sense of the Jewish people being outsiders without necessarily being foreigners has carried throughout Jewish history. It is, for better or worse, an intrinsic part of the Jewish identity. Perhaps this is why Jews have flourished in the United States. Most of the people who came to live here were not natives of the land, so America became a place of outsiders who were all equally foreign.

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.