Equipped For Every Good Work

Lesson 4

BIBLE LANGUAGES: HEBREW

The finger of Jehovah God moved over the surface of two stone tablets located on top of Mount Sinai. On the front side of both tables of stone it wrote. When the finger was lifted from the surface of these durable "pages", thereupon remained the first written copy of the Ten Commandments. They were inscribed in perfectly formed characters of written Hebrew. (Ex. 31:18; 32:16,19; 34:1-4,28) It was at about the same time that Moses started writing on the first five books of the Bible. He wrote in Hebrew. With only a few exceptions, all of the inspired Holy Scripture writers that followed during the next eleven hundred years wrote in the Hebrew language.

In the Hebrew Scriptures only the people are called Hebrews; the language after the death of King Solomon, in 997 B.C., is generally called "the Jews' language". (2 Ki. 18: 26, 28; 2 Chron. 32:18; Isa. 36:11,13) Hebrew belongs to the family of languages that were spoken by most of the descendants of Shem (and a few others). For that reason that family of languages is called the Shemitic or Semitic family. Because God did not confound the language of Noah and Shem at the time of the presumptuous building of the tower of Babel, it is reasonable to conclude that they spoke the original Semitic language from which thereafter stemmed forth the many branches of that language family. Hebrew is the main stem of the Semitic family, it very likely being the language spoken in Eden. By the days of Jacob the Aramaic branch was in evidence, Laban using words different from Jacob's to express the same idea. (Gen. 31:47) When Hebrew began to be used to put in writing the story of creation and a sketch of the 2,500 years of man's history from Eden to the Exodus, which had heretofore been handed down apparently by oral tradition from generation to generation, that language was capable of vividly painting the inspired historical narrative.

Hebrew, like most of the Semitic languages, was written without vowels, just consonants. There were twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet, all of them consonants, but about nine of them could each represent two sounds. The range of the language was expanded to about twenty-eight consonant sounds. The twenty-two Hebrew consonants together with their names appear in their alphabetical order as stanza headings of Psalm 119, in the American Standard Version. But even if the language did not have written vowels, it nonetheless had a plenty of vowel sounds in its oral form. It outstrips English by far in the use of vowel sounds. The crux of the matter is that the written language did not provide vowel letters, and the readers were required to remember and supply the vowel sounds of the spoken tongue, just as English readers must supply the vowels in certain abbreviations, such as bldg. (building), bldr. (builder), blvd. (boulevard), and hgt. (height).

As long as the Hebrew language was spoken those versed therein had no difficulty in supplying the proper vowel sounds when reading the all-consonant text, but when Hebrew ceased to be a living language it became more and more difficult to remember the right vowel sounds to go with the Hebrew Bible manuscripts. But the traditional pronunciation was kept alive and handed down by those specializing in reading the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms for the instruction of the people. Finally, however, during the sixth or seventh century after Christ, a system of dots and dashes was devised and these were placed below, in or above the consonant letters to indicate the exact vowel sounds. These are not called vowel letters, but vowel points. They were added by Jewish scholars called "Masoretes". Also supplied was a system of accent marks to indicate stress, pause, connection between words and clauses, and musical notation. No man on earth today can read this musical notation, the key to it having been lost.

Most words in Hebrew can be traced back to a root with three consonants. Most of these roots are verbs, the most

important part of speech in the Hebrew language. These roots are vivid and expressive, playing upon the senses of seeing, hearing, tasting, touching and smelling. The Hebrew Scriptures use a little more than 2,000 root words, but most of them are so seldom used that if one knows the 500 most frequently used roots he can read most of the Hebrew Bible. The total number of words in the Hebrew vocabulary of the Bible is estimated at from 5,000 to 7,000 words. The Hebrew has two tenses, not so much "tenses" as senses, to their verbs, namely, the perfect or historical tense, and the imperfect or indefinite tense. Hebrew uses no more tenses than those two. For illustration: "If you tell me to do this, I have done it." That is perfectly good Hebrew. "If you tell me" is in the indefinite form: that is, any time you tell me in eternity, past, present or future. "I have done it" is historical or past form, but here refers to a time future after the telling. Though referring to the future, the one who puts the expression in the perfect form thereby means that it is as good as done.

The name "Jehovah" is in a verb form in the indefinite sense. That is the reason why that name can be translated as Rotherham renders it: "He shall, may, or will be whatsoever he shall, may or will be." That is all combined in the one name Jehovah. Because the name has all this significance in it the Christian Scriptural Greek tries to convey its meaning by the expression addressing Jehovah as One "who art, and wast, and art to come". By those three tenses the Greek seeks to express the scope of the name Jehovah. Incidentally, this name of the Creator appears 6,823 times in the Hebrew Scriptures, being represented by its four consonants, JHVH (). After the Hebrew Scriptures were written religious and superstitious Jews considered the name too holy to even pronounce, and substituted Adonay (my Lord) or Elohim (God) for it as they read aloud. To remind the reader to do this the vowels of one or the other of these substitutes were put under the consonants JHVH. Thus we have today the English form

of what religious Jews considered the incommunicable name, that is, Jehovah. Through religious superstition of the Jewish leaders the ancient Hebrew pronunciation has been lost and can only be surmised today, but we do have in English the euphonious anglicized form that appears thousands of times in the American Standard Version Bible and several times in the King James Version Bible.

Malachi, the last book of the Hebrew Scriptures to be written, was recorded in the Jews' language. Its time of composition is not definite, but there is some evidence to believe that it was toward the end of Governor Nehemiah's time, nearly a hundred years after the release of the Israelites from captivity. It is very evident that by that time not all of the Jews understood Hebrew. (Neh. 13:24,25) Only a few years earlier when the law of God was publicly read in the traditional Hebrew tongue, in the Hebrew of the Bible manuscripts, it was necessary for the reading to be put into an Aramaic paraphrase in order for the people to understand. (Neh. 8: 8) Prior to the Jews' captivity in Babylon some Aramaic words had crept into the Hebrew speech; during the seventy years in Babylon the inflow of Aramaisms increased; after the release the Hebrew tongue was overrun and crowded out by the large-scale invasion of Aramaic, and it ceased to exist shortly after Nehemiah's days as the living language of the Jewish people. Only the Jewish priests and scribes thereafter knew the Hebrew of the Scriptures. Aramaic became the common language of what was once Jehovah God's chosen nation.

The study of the Hebrew language was almost entirely forgotten by non-Jews until the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century other Semitic languages were studied. In the eighteenth century the grammar of other Semitic languages was compared with that of Hebrew. In the nineteenth century Wilhelm Gesenius began a strong revival of the study of the Hebrew of the Scriptures, which move was taken up and continued by others. Since that time knowledge of this language that comprises more than three-

fourths of the inspired Bible canon as it was originally written has increased rapidly. The publisher's note, dated 1935, in The Complete Bible, An American Translation, says: "Hebrew scholarship is moving fast, and even the few years that have elapsed since the first edition [of this modern speech Bible version] was issued in 1931 have seen contributions to the subject that neither translator nor publisher can ignore."