Early History of Hebrew
Hebrew is an Afro-Asiatic language. This language family probably originated in northeast Africa, and began to diverge around the 8th millennium BC, though there is much debate about the actual date. (Although this theory is espoused by most archeologists and linguists, it is at odds with the traditional reading of the Torah.) Speakers of Proto-Afro-Asiatic spread northeast, eventually reaching the Middle East.
At the end of the 3rd millennium BC the ancestral languages of Aramaic, Ugaritic and other various Canaanite languages were spoken in the Levant alongside the influential dialects of Ebla and Akkad. As the Hebrew founders from northern Haran filtered south into and came under the influence of the Levant, like many sojourners into Canaan including the Philistines, they adopted Canaanite dialects.
The first written evidence of distinctive Hebrew, the Gezer calendar, dates back to the 10th century BC, the traditional time of the reign of David and Solomon. It presents a list of seasons and related agricultural activities. The Gezer calendar (named after the city in whose proximity it was found) is written in an old Semitic script, akin to the Phoenician one that through the Greeks and Etruscans later became the Roman script used today in almost all European languages. The Gezer calendar is written without any vowels, and it does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places where more modern spelling requires it (see below).
Numerous older tablets have been found in the region with similar scripts written in other Semitic languages, for example Protosinaitic. It is believed that the original shapes of the script go back to the hieroglyphs of the Egyptian writing, though the phonetic values are instead inspired by the acrophonic principle. The common ancestor of Hebrew and Phoenician is called Canaanite, and was the first to use a Semitic alphabet distinct from Egyptian. One ancient Canaanite document is the famous Moabite Siloam Inscription. Less ancient samples of Old Hebrew include the ostraka found near Lachish which describe events preceding the final capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian captivity of 586 BC.
The most famous work originally written in Hebrew is the Bible, though the time at which it was written is a matter of dispute. The earliest extant copies were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Those who believe that the Bible is an accurate history argue that the Pentateuch was written in the 15th century BC with parts of Genesis going back much further. Those who accept the documentary hypothesis claim that although the texts of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) were written down relatively late, perhaps as late as 500 BC, it is apparent that some of them date back to as early as the 9th century BC. Further, that our knowledge of the older forms of the Hebrew language is limited due to the editing that the texts must have undergone in the process of being written down.
The formal language of the Babylonian Empire was Aramaic (its name is either derived from "Aram Naharayim", Mesopotamia, or from "Aram," Canaanite for "highland," the ancient name for Syria). The Persian Empire, which had captured Babylonia a few decades later under Cyrus, adopted Aramaic as the official language. Aramaic is also a North-West Semitic language, quite similar to Hebrew. Aramaic has contributed many words and expressions to Hebrew, mainly as the language of commentary in the Talmud and other religious works.
In addition to numerous words and expressions, Hebrew also borrowed the Aramaic writing system. Although the original Aramaic letter forms were derived from the same Phoenician alphabet that was used in ancient Israel, they had changed significantly, both in the hands of the Mesopotamians and of the Jews, assuming the forms familiar to us today around the first century A.D.. Writings of that era (most notably, some of the Dead Sea Scrolls found in Qumran) are written in a script very similar to the "square" one still used today.
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