Starting in elementary school, and now in my online Hebrew classes from Tel Aviv, I’ve been learning Modern Hebrew, the version of the language spoken in Israel today, and it is much more my speed than Biblical Hebrew. The last time I studied Biblical Hebrew, if I ever really studied it, was back in high school, and for the most part I found it impenetrable. The text was most often translated by our teachers, including the six or seven commentaries we would read for each sentence. I mean, sure, if we’d had mysteries written in Biblical Hebrew, I might have paid more attention, but reading through the laws in Leviticus word by word, a sentence or two per day, did not capture my attention.
But recently, I’ve been making a point of reading along in Hebrew, during Bible study sessions at my synagogue, as someone else reads the English translation out loud, and I’ve started to notice some of the differences between Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew, and to understand why it was all so hard to understand when I was a kid. I’ll find myself reading along, mostly understanding the Hebrew words and feeling pretty good about myself, and then suddenly a word that is clearly in the future tense in the Hebrew will be translated into the past tense in the English, or a word that I was sure I understood from Modern Hebrew will be given an entirely different connotation, and I’ll be lost all over again.
Even though it’s all Hebrew, the gap between Biblical and Modern Hebrew is at least as wide as the gap between today’s English and Shakespeare’s, but probably wider. There were only 8,000 or so attested Hebrew words in the Bible, including words borrowed from Akkadian (used by the Assyrians and Babylonians) and Egyptian and Greek. Today, there are over 100,000 words in Modern Hebrew, including loan words from all of the different cultures Jews have lived in for millennia, including Arabic and English and German and Spanish and Russian and Persian and on and on. In the interim, along with the added vocabulary, the grammar, and syntax, and even pronunciation have also changed, by a lot.
Actually, Hebrew was only the spoken language spoken in ancient Israel until sometime before the Common Era, when Aramaic took over. And then, after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem, in 70 CE, most of the Jewish population was scattered around the world, and each community spoke the language of their new homes. Biblical Hebrew was still used by the rabbis in their commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, though, and by Jews in general during prayer and study, and as a result, the word count of written Hebrew grew to 20,000 or so, including many words borrowed from Aramaic and other neighboring languages. And then the Medieval sages added another 6,500 words, while writing their own commentaries and sacred poetry.
Eventually, in the 1800’s, a movement to revive spoken Hebrew began, with some Jewish writers using Hebrew to write secular literature, instead of just keeping Hebrew in the study hall or the synagogue anymore. Eliezer Ben Yehuda codified this new version of Hebrew in the early 1900’s, and when the Modern State of Israel was created, Hebrew was chosen as the national language. And today, Modern Hebrew is evolving much more quickly, but it is still the same language. Some words that were used in Biblical Hebrew have been replaced in daily usage with new words in Modern Hebrew, but they still exist. You can even use the older words in your everyday life and be understood, but you will sound kind of like an English speaker reciting Shakespeare as you order your coffee.
The most important discovery, for me, in researching Biblical Hebrew, was the Conversive Vav. This was the mystery that started the whole thing: how are verbs that are written in the future tense in Biblical Hebrew suddenly transformed into the past tense in the English. I found a bunch of long, drawn out, incomprehensible explanations for how the Conversive Vav is used, but suffice it to say that when it shows up it can change future tense into past tense and past tense into future tense. Like magic. In Modern Hebrew, if you find the letter Vav in front of a Hebrew word, it usually means “and,” and if you see something written in the future tense, it remains in the future tense, no hocus pocus allowed.
You can, of course, go much deeper into studying Biblical Hebrew, to the point where you can even date when the different books of the Hebrew Bible may have been written, or figure out which parts of each story may have come from a previous era and were then added into a more recent re-telling of the story. My rabbi is fascinated by all of this stuff, and I’m happy to let him do the work of figuring it out so I don’t have to.
I am not a linguist, or a grammarian, or even a very good speller, but I am fascinated by the idea that a language is a living thing, that changes as the people who speak it change. I still much prefer Modern Hebrew to the Biblical version, but I love that I get to visit my ancestors and hear their particular dialect each time I open the Hebrew Bible. Who knows what future generations will be able to learn about us when they read through our writings? A lot depends on what they will have access to: they could be reading non-fiction histories, or true crime, or young adult science fiction, or page after page of shopping lists from the height of the egg-price crisis. And what they read, and the way they interpret it, will determine who they think we were and what they learn from us.
I often wonder what the rabbis chose to edit out of the Hebrew Bible along the way, and why. I bet my ancestors wrote their own version of shopping lists, and wrote all kinds of other things the rabbis didn’t think we needed to know, for one reason or another. Just imagine, there could be a treasure trove of ancient Biblical fan fiction, or diaries of young girls complaining about the horror of animal sacrifices and all of the chores they had to do around the farm, all buried in a cave somewhere in Israel, waiting to be discovered. If anything like that comes up, I may have to rethink my resistance to learning Biblical Hebrew. Only time will tell.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
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