"Let There Be Hebrew"

Hebrew as the Hebrew Bible Saw It

Where did Hebrew come from? For the best part of three millennia, the answer has regularly been sought in the Bible itself:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

These famous words, verses 1–3 of Genesis 1 as rendered in the 1611 King James Version, speak of God speaking. They might thus be construed as describing the creation of the Hebrew language.

Or again, they might not. The Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh, as Jews traditionally call it) is studiously silent about Hebrew. In fact, the entire twenty-four books provide what amount to just three mentions of the Hebrew language by name, if indeed yehudit (the language of Judea) and sefat Kena'an (the language of Canaan) actually denote Hebrew. As for the two names that Jews have historically most often used for Hebrew, ivrit and leshon ha-kodesh (the holytongue), neither appears in the Bible. The language in which the Hebrew Bible was written and, one might assume, the language used by the Israelites since the birth of the Hebrew nation in Egyptian slavery, just seems to be there, humming in the background.

So are we meant to assume that Jacob and his sons spoke Hebrew? Going back further, what about Abraham? Noah? Adam? The text contains some hints about these questions, but it is by no means clear what to make of them. Take, for instance, this passage from Genesis 2, which comes after God has created Adam and placed him in the Garden:

Then the Lord God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him." So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him. (Genesis 2:18–20)

Genesis here is making a major statement about language and society. What that statement is remains the subject of endless debate, but this much seems clear: Adam is not presented with words for the various animals; he devises them himself, whether arbitrarily or logically. But in what language? The Bible does not appear to say. But then comes Adam's promised "helper," and this:

She shall be called woman (ishah) because she was taken out of man (ish). (Genesis 2:23)

Not only does Adam coin the word for woman, he also assigns the woman a name:

And Adam called his wife's name Eve (Hava) because she was the mother of all living (hay). (Genesis 3:20)

By these linguistic associations, which work for Hebrew but by no means for other languages, Genesis is subtly implying that Adam spoke Hebrew. And similar linguistic associations are offered to explain the names of his sons Cain and Seth. So, too, for Noah:

and he called his name Noah, saying, "Out of the ground which the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief (yenahamenu) from our work and from the toil of our hands." (Genesis 5:29)

These are but a few examples. The Bible explains the naming of scores of persons and places, overtly or implicitly, by Hebrew word association.

True, much later on, the biblical prophets also liked to take advantage of the way the names of foreign places and potentates resonate in Hebrew. But they are clearly engaging in literary wordplay. Genesis, by contrast, seems to want us to imagine Adam, Noah, and certain other figures speaking Hebrew. Indeed, at one juncture, when Jacob, ancestor of Israel, and Laban the Aramean are staking a geographical boundary between their respective spheres of influence, Jacob assigns the boundary cairn a Hebrew name, while Laban assigns it a name that is clearly the Aramaic equivalent.

The first explicit reference to language in the Bible is in the Tower of Babel story. Before the tower, we're told, "the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech." But after:

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound (balal) the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:9)

What was the "one language"? Presumably, if Adam spoke Hebrew, that would be the answer. Some have suggested that this Hebrew, or whatever it was, could instead have been just a shared lingua franca rather than a universal mother tongue — a kind of antediluvian Esperanto. But that is not the obvious sense. What the book of Genesis seems to be telling us, implicitly and explicitly, is that in the beginning, humanity spoke Hebrew.

Digging below the Surface

What language, then, does God speak? We read that God creates light by verbal fiat:

And God said, "Let there be light." And there was light.

Ten times, in fact, God "speaks" in order to create (although some things He simply creates without speaking). In the Middle Ages, Moses Maimonides and other rationalist Jewish philosophers held that all instances of divine speech in the Bible should be understood metaphorically. Mystics, on the other hand, took this passage to mean that, by these speech acts, God was creating or deploying Hebrew itself, rather than waiting for a human being to do so. And this reading is not far from the plain sense of the text.

A closer look at the opening verse of Genesis gives reason to believe that Hebrew is being accorded primordial status. The first three words are bereshit bara elohim, usually translated "In the beginning God created" or, if we follow the word order of the Hebrew, "In-the-beginning, created God." The first two words begin with the same string of three letters, bet resh alef. What this might mean is altogether beyond the plain meaning of the words. At the very least, the Bible seems to be signaling something through the phonetic or graphic resonances between these first two words. Perhaps, then, the Hebrew letters or strings of letters throughout the Bible convey a level of significance (a "semiotic," to use linguistic terminology) quite separate from the plain sense of the words these letters form.

Of course, many talented authors, writing in many languages, have relied on meaningful resonance. But Hebrew's intrinsic features made it especially reverberant in a way that European languages are not. Almost the entire Hebrew word stock consists of groups of...