HEBREW LANGUAGE. r. Hebrew as a spoken Language,—The Hebrew language is that which was the national idiom of those descendants of 'Etter which received the distinctive name of the People of Israel, and, as such, was that in which all the books of the O. T. (with the exception of the few Chaldee passages occurring in those written after the Babylonian captivity) were originally com posed. It belongs to the Semitic, or, as it is more appropriately called, the Syro-Arabian family of languages ; and it occupies a central point amidst all the branches of this family, as well with refer ence to the geographical position of the country in which it prevailed, as with reference to the de gree of development to which it attained. In point of antiquity, however, it is the oldest form of human speech known to us, and, front the early civilization, as well as from the religious advan tages of the Hebrews, has preserved to us the oldest and purest form of the Syro-Arabian language.* If we except the terms lip of Canaan' gm, lyn) in Is. xix. 18—where the diction is of an elevated character, and is so far no evidence that this designation was the one commonly employed —the only name by which the Hebrew language is mentioned in the O. T. is Jewish' (11411114, used adverbially, yudaice, in .7ewish, 2 Kings xviii. 26, 28 ; Is. xxxvi. 1, 13 ; 2 Cilr011. XXXii. 18 .11, where the feminine may be explained as an abstract of the last formation, according to Ewald's Hebr. Gram. secs. 344, 457, or as referring to the usual gender of Irr.6 understood. In a strict sense, however, Jewish ' denotes the idiom of the king dom of Judah, which became the predominant one after the deportation of the ten tribes. It is in the Greek writings of the later Jews that Hebrew' is first applied to the language, as in the gppa rari of the prologue to Ecclesiasticus and in the .7X(7,crect rt7w 'Eppatun, of Josephus. (The qiIpats ataXerros of the N. T. is used in contmdistinction to the idiom of the Hellenist Jews, and does not mean the ancient Hebrew language, but the then vernacular Aramaic dialect of Palestine.) Our title to use the designation Hebrew language is, there fore, founded on the fact that the nation which spoke this idiom was properly distinguished by the ethnographical name of Hebrews.
The best evidences which we possess as to the form of the Hebrew language, prior to its first his torical period, tend to shew that Abraham, on his entmnce into Canaan, found the language then prevailing among almost all the different tribes in habiting that country to be in at least dialectual affinity with his own. This is gathered from the fol
lowing facts : that nearly all the names of places and persons relating to those tribes admit of He brew etymologies; that, amidst all the accounts of the intercourse of the Hebrews with the nations of Canaan, we find no hint of a diversity of idiom ; and that even the comparatively recent remains of the Phcenician and Punic lariguages bear a mani. fest affinity to the Hebrew. But whether the He. brew language as seen in the earliest books of the O. T., is the very dialect which Abraham brozThz with him into Canaan ; or whether it is the com mon tongue of the Canaanite nations, which Abra ham only adopted from them, and which was after wards developed to greater fulness under the peculiar moral and political influences to which his posterity were exposed, are questions which, in the absence of conclusive arguments, are generally discussed with some dogmatical prepossessions. Almost all those who support the first view con tend also that Hebrew was the primitive language of mankind. S. Morinus, in the work above cited, and Loscher, in his De Causir Ling. Hebr., are among the best champions of this opinion ; but Havernick has recently advocated it, with such modifications as nmke it more acceptable (Einleit. in das 7'est., I. p. 148, sq.) The principal argument on which they depend is that, as the most important proper names in the first part of Genesis (as Cain, Seth, and others) are evidently founded on Hebrew etymologies, the essential connection of these names with their etymological origins involves the historical credibility of the re. cords themselves, and leaves no room for any other conclusion than that the Hebrewlanguage is comval with the earliest history of man. The advocates of the other opinion attach some weight to the cogency with which they infer, from the pheno mena of the Hebrew language itself, that its roots were at one period biliteral, and were afterwards developed to the compass of three consonants. They also rest on the evidence which Gen. xxxi. 47 affords, that the near relatives of Abraham, residing too in the country from which he had recently emi grated, spoke Aramair; and they think this war rants the conclusion that Aramaic must have been the vernacular dialect of Abmham himselL Lastly, Gesenius lays some stress on the circumstance that the language not only denotes west by 04, sea, but that it does not possess any other word to express that sense.