Hebrew

Hebrew is a Canaanite language of the Northwest Semitic group, spoken in antiquity by the Israelites of the Levant. Its oldest written remains, including the Gezer calendar, date to the tenth century BCE, and the Hebrew Bible was composed in Biblical Hebrew, reaching roughly its present form around the Babylonian captivity of 586 BCE; Jews came to call it the holy tongue.

After the Bar Kokhba revolt failed in the second century CE, Aramaic and Greek displaced Hebrew in daily life, but it remained the language of Jewish prayer, rabbinic learning, commerce and poetry. The first dated printed Hebrew book appeared in 1475.

The Samaritans kept their own Hebrew dialect and an alphabet descended from the ancient Paleo-Hebrew script for their liturgy. In the nineteenth century scholars and settlers revived Hebrew as a spoken language.