Hebrew (in modern Hebrew ivrit) is a Shamitic-Semitic language belonging to the north-central branch of the Semitic language family of the Canaanite group. It is closely related to Phoenician and Aramaic languages as well as to Arabic.

Classical Hebrew is the ritual and liturgical language of the Jewish religion, while Modern Hebrew has over nine million speakers in Israel and one million in the rest of the world. Hebrew is the official language of the State of Israel.

Hebrew is the language of the Hebrew Bible (תַּנַ”ךְ / tanakh) and the Mishnah; that of most apocryphal books (ספרים חיצוניים / sefarim hiśoniyim) is Aramaic. The Qumran Scrolls (ספרים גנוזות / sefarim genuzot) discovered in caves north of the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956, are also written primarily in Hebrew. Apart from copies of biblical books, only one manuscript in six was written in Aramaic (some manuscripts were also composed in Greek).

In the Bible, especially in the first book, Genesis , in chapter 14, verse 13, we find אברם העברי / Abram ha-‘ibri, it is “Abram the Hebrew” before he became Abraham (אַבְרָהָם / Abraham), but the text makes no mention of the language spoken by him and his descendants. It is generally accepted that the term “Hebrew” would come from the expression “מעבר לנהר / me-‘eber la-nahar” (across the river), which refers to the origin of Abraham.

The text of the Hebrew Bible in use in printed editions or in the Torah scrolls in the synagogue is called the “massoretic” text (מסורת / massoret, meaning “transmission”). Its writing is the result of several centuries of work, from the time of the kings (vii century BC) to that of the Maccabees (book of Daniel, 167 BC), whose different stages are difficult to establish.

Biblical Hebrew is a religious language, probably different from the language spoken by the population. Indeed, it contains mainly terms that can be used in a religious context. The Bible contains no more than 8,000 words, of which 2,000 are hapax (words that appear only once), and these words are built on only 500 Hebrew roots. By comparison, at the same time, the Greek lexicon contained 120,000 words. A more diverse popular vocabulary, now extinct, must have existed alongside the formalist and specialized language of the Bible.

From the tenth century onwards, it was outside Palestine, in the midst of the various Jewish communities of the diaspora (גלות / galut) that Hebrew survived, until its remarkable revival in Israel in the twentieth century following the efforts of Eliezer Ben-Yehoudah.

In everyday life, Jews spoke the language of the country in which they lived, reserving the Hebrew language for the cultural domain. It was in this language that the Jews of the Diaspora prayed three times a day, read the Torah and studied its commentaries. It was also in Hebrew that sages (חכמים / hakhamim) from different countries corresponded. Hebrew production in cultic, cultural and professional fields show the dynamics of the Hebrew language over the long historical period.

The Hebrew language is written from right to left with an alphabet of twenty-two letters. Originally, they denoted only consonants, but V ו, Y י and H ה are also used to represent certain long vowels and end-of-word vowels (V = /u/; Y = /i/; H = /a/, /o/ and /e/; V and Y were later used for /o/ and /e/, respectively) until at least the 10th century bc. B.C. and V and Y in the word interior until the 9th century. These auxiliary consonants, written to denote vowels, are also used in other Semitic languages, and are called nikud (dots).

In texts from Qumran and in later writings, letters were used more profusely to represent vowels. The complete system of vowel representation, adding dots to consonants, was developed much later, between the 5th and 10th centuries.

The present system of vowelization thus reproduces the current pronunciation of about a thousand years after the end of the biblical period, although it is undoubtedly based on early Bible reading traditions.

In the grammar it presents an approach to the syntax of European languages, as well as an important amount of lexical borrowings from these languages.

From the typological point of view, Hebrew is a synthetic language with a high degree of fusion. In terms of basic order, Hebrew uses prepositions, with a tendency to be core-initial. A morphosyntactic alignment of nominative-accusative type.