Betzalel's ability to construct the Mishkan (Tabernacle), the forerunner of the Temple, came through understanding how God combined Hebrew letters to create the world.
So too, in the metaphysical world: the 22 Hebrew letters are the building blocks of Creation. Imagine a chemical compound of hydrogen and oxygen that produces water a small change – adding a second another oxygen molecule – produces hydrogen peroxide. Hebrew is the building blocks of Creation. In honor the launch of Aish Academy’s new Hebrew Ulpan course, here are the top 5 reasons to learn Hebrew: 1. They now spoke Hebrew with a large admixture of Aramaic or Chaldee, which latterly became the predominant element in the national language.Every Jew can and should learn Hebrew. Hebrew was never spoken in its purity by the Jews after their return from Babylon.
From the first, it appears in its full maturity of development.īut through intercourse with Damascus, Assyria, and Babylon, from the time of David, and more particularly from the period of the Exile, it comes under the influence of the Aramaic idiom, and this is seen in the writings which date from this period. It preserves all through a remarkable uniformity of structure. Linguistic changesįor the thousand years between Moses and the Babylonian exile, the Hebrew language underwent little or no modification. Whether this language, as seen in the earliest books of the Old Testament, was the very dialect which Abraham brought with him into Canaan, or whether it was the common tongue of the Canaanitish nations which he only adopted, is uncertain. Isaiah calls it “the language of Canaan” ( Isa. When Abraham entered Canaan it is obvious that he found the language of its inhabitants closely allied to his own, as they too were Shem’s descendants. Hebrew is one of the class of languages called Semitic, because they were chiefly spoken among the descendants of Shem. This name is first used by the Jews in times subsequent to the close of the Old Testament.
In the Old Testament, Hebrew is only spoken of as Jewish ( 2 Kings 18:26, 28 Isaiah 36:11, 13 2 Chr 32:18). The first letter in the Hebrew Bible is ב (Bet)… ExamplesĮxample: The Hebrew word for “ camel” is גמלַ (LMG) -rearranged left-to-right = GML ( gamal / Phoenician: gāmāl / Arabic: jamal ) Other languages that are writen right-to-left are Aramaic, Syriac, Persian, Kurdish, Arabic, Azeri, Divehi, Fula, N'ko, Rohingya, and Urdu. Hebrew is written from right-to-left ←, opposite of the English language. This can be a source of difficulty in interpreting certain words in modern times, for the meaning varies according to the vowels which may be supplied. In ancient times, only the consonants of the words were written. The English word alphabet comes from the names of the first 2 letters of the Hebrew alphabet-Aleph+Bet. The Hebrew alphabet is the world’s oldest. Hence the same word sometimes has a great variety of meanings, depending on the context. The Hebrew of the Old Testament has only about 6-thousand words, all derived from about 5-hundred roots. The Semitic languages, to which class the Hebrew and Phoenician belonged, were spoken over a very wide area: in Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Israel and Arabia, in all the countries from the Mediterranean to the borders of Assyria, and from the mountains of Armenia to the Indian Ocean. The rounded form of the letters, as seen in the Moabite stone, was probably that in which the ancient Hebrew was written down to the time of the Exile, when the present square or Chaldean form was adopted. It is essentially identical with the Phoenician language. Hebrew is one of the oldest languages of which we have any knowledge. Hebrew is the language of the Hebrew people, and is the language in which the Old Testament is written, with the exception of a few portions in Chaldee.