Mishnaic And Medieval Hebrew

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We have seen that Hebrew continued from the early days of Creation, down through the kings of Israel, through the exile, and continued its influence as a spoken language even in New Testament times. On our journey through time, we soon enter the first few centuries C.E. This was the time in which the Mishnah and the Talmud were written, that vast storehouse of Jewish thought and wisdom. Hebrew had generally ceased to be a spoken language by this time, and the vocabulary of the Tanakh was insufficient to express all the things the Rabbis wished to say. The Hebrew of the Mishnah therefore starts to diverge somewhat from Biblical Hebrew. New vocabulary starts to be introduced, the spellings of words are often changed, and the grammar is altered and expanded to become more expressive. The Aramaic influence in the Mishnah is easy to see.

Fundamentally, however, the Hebrew of Mishnaic times is still the same language as the prophets and kings of Israel spoke all those hundreds of years earlier. If you can understand the Hebrew of the Tanakh, understanding the Mishnah should not present any major difficulties.
 

The next major phase of the Hebrew language is in Medieval times, perhaps around the 7th to 10th centuries C.E. Hebrew in this period remained deeply rooted to its past, but went through a revitalisation when a great deal of poetry was written in the Hebrew language, mainly in the Jewish cultural centres in places such as Spain, Italy and central Europe. These were the times of such Jewish writers and poets as Saadiah Gaon, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Moses ibn Ezra and Maimonides, although the latter wrote most of his work in Arabic. A lot of Hebrew poetry was written during these times.

Despite the fact that Jews were in the diaspora and scattered from their land, Hebrew remained a uniting factor for God's people. Despite being few in number amid the nations to which they were cast, Jews clung tenaciously to Hebrew and continued to develop the language. It never died as a literary and liturgical language, just as the Jewish people never gave up hope that one day they would be back in the beloved Land of Israel, speaking Hebrew in the streets of Jerusalem once again.

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