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Hebrew language

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
member of the Canaanite group of the West Semitic subdivision of the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic family of languages (see Afroasiatic languages ). Hebrew was the language of the Jewish people in biblical times, and most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. The oldest extant example of Hebrew writing dates from the 11th or 10th cent. B.C. Hebrew began to die out as a spoken tongue among the Jews after they were defeated by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. Well before the time of Jesus it had been replaced by Aramaic as the Jewish vernacular, although it was preserved as the language of the Jewish religion. From A.D. 70, when the dispersion of the Jews from Palestine began, until modern times, Hebrew has remained the Jewish language of religion, learning, and literature. During this 2,000-year period, Hebrew has always been spoken to some extent. At the end of the 19th cent. the Zionist movement brought about the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, which culminated in its…
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Full text Article Hebrew language

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Semitic language that is both a sacred language of Judaism and a modern vernacular in Israel. Like Aramaic , to which it is closely related, Hebrew has a documented history of nearly 3,000 years. The earliest fully attested stage of the language is Biblical Hebrew: the earlier parts (“Standard…
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Full text Article Hebrew language

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
member of the Canaanite group of the West Semitic subdivision of the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic family of languages (see Afroasiatic languages ). Hebrew was the language of the Jewish people in biblical times, and most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. The oldest extant example…
| 493 words
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Full text Article Hebrew language

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Member of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken in Southwest Asia by the ancient Hebrews, sustained for many centuries in the Diaspora as the liturgical language of Judaism, and revived by the late-19th-century Haskalah intellectual movement, which spread modern European culture among Jews. The…
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Full text Article Modern Hebrew

From Encyclopedia of World Religions: Encyclopedia of Judaism
Hebrew is the holy language of the Torah....
In Israel today the primary written and spoken language is Modern Hebrew. Modern Hebrew is based on the ancient Semitic language used in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, the Mishnah, and in many Jewish religious and literary creations of the Middle Ages. Hebrew consists of 22 consonants, and it is…
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Full text Article Ben-Yehudah, Eliezer

From Encyclopedia of World Religions: Encyclopedia of Judaism
(b. 1858–d. 1922) Zionist leader and founder of Modern Hebrew Born in the Lithuanian town of Luzhky on January 7, 1858, Eliezer Ben-Yehudah's original name was Eliezer Yitzhak Perelman. Ben-Yehudah began learning Hebrew at a young age as part of his scrupulous religious upbringing, like all the…
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Full text Article Hebrew

From The Chambers Dictionary
a member of an ancient Semitic people; the language of the Hebrews, in which the Old Testament and sacred texts of Judaism are written; unintelligible speech ( inf ). adj of the Hebrews or their language. [OFr Ebreu and L’ Hebraeus , from Gr Hebraios , from Aramaic ‚ebrai (Heb ‚ibrī ), literally, …
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Full text Article Hebrew alphabet

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Script used to write the Hebrew language and a number of other languages used as vernaculars by Jews, including Ladino and Yiddish . The modern 22-letter alphabet in use today differs only slightly from the script adapted by Jewish scribes in the early centuries bc from the square script used to…
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Full text Article Amichai, Yehuda

From Encyclopedia of World Religions: Encyclopedia of Judaism
(b. 1924–d. 2000) Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai was one of Israel's most important 20th-century Hebrew poets. He influenced the direction of modern Israeli poetry and attained wide popularity. Amichai was born in Bavaria in 1924 to a family steeped in Orthodox Judaism, and he received a traditional…
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Full text Article Abu Zayyad, Ziyad

From Encyclopedia of the Palestinians
(b. 1940–) Palestinian journalist Ziyad Abu Zayyad was born in Ayzariyya (Bethany) in 1940. He received a degree in law from Damascus University in 1965. He worked thereafter in the Jordanian department of immigration and passports in Jerusalem. After the Israeli occupation of his native West Bank , …
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Full text Article Hebrew literature

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
literary works, from ancient to modern, written in the Hebrew language. The great monuments of the earliest period of Hebrew literature are the Old Testament and the Apocrypha . Parts of the Pseudepigrapha and of the Dead Sea Scrolls were also produced before the conquest of Judaea by Titus. The…
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