Hebrew In The Beginning

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Hebrew is the oldest language in existence. It goes right back to the creation of the world, when God said, “Let there be light!” and there was light (Genesis 1:3). When God created Adam and Eve, He spoke to them in Hebrew, and when Adam named all the living creatures that God created, he gave them Hebrew names. Hebrew is the original language from which all others ultimately derive.

The Tanakh says in the book of Genesis:

Genesis 11:1; “And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.”

Hebrew, then, was the original language that people spoke at the beginning of time. But this harmonious situation was not to last, because the above passage goes on to explain that the inhabitants of the earth started to build a great tower to reach up to heaven. But the LORD said, “Behold, the people is one and they have all one language.” And so, about 4000 B.C.E. at the Tower of Babel, “the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth” and He “scattered them abroad from thence across the face of all the earth.” (Genesis 11:6-10). This was the incident that led from Hebrew being a pure language spoken by all peoples, into just one of a number of languages in existence in the Ancient Lands of the Middle East.

After the Tower of Babel, the people of the earth began to speak in different languages. Linguists believe that there are two main groups of languages - the Indo-European, containing languages such as Sanskrit, English, French and German, and the Semitic languages (named after Shem, one of Noah's sons), which include Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Akkadian and Ethiopic. It is probably more accurate to say the languages of the world can be split into three groups – Semitic, Hamitic and Japhetic – after the names of Noah's three sons, since the world was re-populated by them after the flood.

The languages within each of these groups are very closely related, and contain a large amount of common vocabulary and similar grammar. Linguists admit that the two groups contain a great deal of puzzling similarities, but this fact can be explained by the passage we saw earlier about all the inhabitants of the earth speaking a common language before the Tower of Babel. In fact, careful research by a number of scholars has demonstrated convincingly that so-called Indo-European languages such as English actually derive from Hebrew, rather than a Germanic language. For instance, the book The Word: The Dictionary That Reveals The Hebrew Source of English by Isaac Mozeson carefully catalogues several thousand English words that are clearly of Hebrew origin, once some consistent pronunciation differences are uncovered. The same thing has been done for other languages. Once the veil is removed, therefore, all languages ultimately derive from Hebrew.


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