The Semites: Where Did They Come From? How They Are Different From Others

Nadene Goldfoot                                               

                  Terah and Abram looking over the land at Haran, Abram's brother's Home, near the Euphrates River.  

Abraham was the youngest one of 3 important sons of Terah the Ivrite, son of Nahor I;     Nahor II, Haran, and Abram whose ancestry stretched back to Noah of the Great Flood.  He, Nahor and Terah lived in the large and ancient city of Ur of the Chaldees/Kasdim people where Terah was an idol maker and they lived near their shop.  One day Abram, for he was first named Abram, had a realization that idols  were nothing but molded clay and that there was but one god.  He had been alone in the shop as a boy, minding it, and had stumbled into one of the idols, the moon god, Nanna, breaking it.  When his father returned and saw the mess, he was angry, of course, and asked Abram what had been going on.  Quick to think, Abram blamed one of the idols for pushing over that one, relieving himself of the blame.  Terah laughed as his ingenuity and realized also that their belief was poppy-cock!  He had a whole pantheon of gods in his shop.  What would he ever do with them all.  Maybe have a sale?  He had so many that Abram couldn't walk without knocking one over!

Abram was a large boy, with big feet.  Surely he'd grow into them one day.  They had a talk and Abram told him of his dreams about a singular G-d.  They decided to leave Ur and all the pantheon of gods and goddesses and move out West where there were no large cities so that Abram could bring up a family that believed in only one powerful all-inclusive G-d.  They made plans for their future.  By the time they left, Abram had married his niece, Sarai, daughter of his brother, Haran II, who was so beautiful.  

By following the Euphrates River northward, they could reach Haran where Abram's brother had lived.  From there they could take Haran's son, Lot with them, since Haran had recently died in Ur on a visit.  It was Terah's job to take over Haran's fatherly responsibilities now as grandfather.  The trail from there went westward and then south to Canaan, their goal.  It was a good  month's journey to Haran.

After reaching Haran, Terah found a woman to his liking and remarried and had many more children, girls as well as boys, and died in Haran.  So did Nahor, who had married Milcah and had 8 children. Abram and Sarah had Isaac.  Terah died there in the year 2083 BCE., having lived there 205 years,  when Isaac was 35.    Terah had been born in 1883 BCE, by Akkadian math, which would have been about 70 years old by our time.  This caused Abram and Sarah to decide that now was the time to push on and follow Abram's dream of living alone, away from idol-worshippers and their pantheon of gods, for he felt that he must tell others who would listen about his thoughts of how the world was created and how it revolved.  Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran.                                               

Life had been good to Abram as he accumulated much wealth by living in Haran.  He left with all of it.  

By 24 years from their time of leaving Haran, their names would be changed from Abram to Abraham, and Sarai to Sarah because of events that would happen.  

We get to verse 14 in Genesis where Abram is like a general, fighting against Kings like Amraphel of Shinar,  living there.  A fugitive told Abram, the Ivri/  which meant "THE OTHER SIDE"  In other words, the other side of the Euphrates River.  ...that Lot had been taken captive, and Abram took his 318 men with him to rescue Lot. We see that Abram was brave in battle. 

 Figuratively, at this point he was on the other side of a moral and spiritual divide from the people of the world at that point, as all were practicing polytheism of some type or other.  

The name meant that he was a descendant of EBER.  Only Abraham's descendants are called THE IVRIM in the Bible, as they spoke Hebrew, distinguishing them from other people.  

 Eber was the grandson of SHEM, one of 3 sons of Noah.  His descendants form a group of Semitic peoples and tribes, including the Israelites who are therefore, called HEBREWS.  Peoples speaking languages akin to Hebrew are accordingly called Semitic peoples and their languages are Semitic languages.  Being a Semite is language based, not racist-based.  According to the Bible, the nations of Elam, Asshur, Arpachshad and Aram were from Shem.  Eber's father was Arpachshad, one of the sons of Shem.                                                  

In tracing where this Hebrew-speaking clan came from, I find that Arpachshad, ancestor of the Hebrews, is applied as a name to a region- perhaps a province in the vicinity of Mosul, Iraq. 

The area in which Mosul lies was an integral part of Assyria from as early as the 25th century BCE. After the Akkadian Empire (2335–2154 BC), which united all of the peoples of Mesopotamia under one rule, Mosul again became a continuous part of Assyria proper from circa 2050 BCE through to the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire between 612 and 599 BCE. 

Mosul remained within the geopolitical province of Assyria for a further thirteen centuries (as a part of Achaemenid Assyria, Seleucid Syria, Roman Assyria and Sasanian Asōristān) until the early Muslim conquests of the mid-7th century. After the Muslim conquests, the region saw a gradual influx of Muslim Arab, Kurdish and Turkic peoples, although the indigenous Assyrians continue to use the name Athura for the ecclesiastical province.

                                                                      

      Read right to left:  

  Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of languages. Canaanite languages are a branch of the Northwest Semitic family of languages.  Today we have more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta, in small pockets in the Caucasus as well as in often large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe and Australasia speaking the Semitic languages, previously also named Syro-Arabian languages, which are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in the Middle East. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.

 According to Avraham Ben-Yosef, Hebrew flourished as a spoken language in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah during the period from about 1200 to 586 BCE. Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew was a spoken vernacular in ancient times following the Babylonian exile when the predominant international language in the region was Old Aramaic.   Hebrew has been used by all Jews in their synagogues, but was almost lost to us as a spoken language until Jews who were returning in the 1880s to Palestine took up the mantle of speaking this almost dead language.  

Hebrew has been revived several times as a literary language, most significantly by the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement of early and mid-19th-century Germany. In the early 19th century, a form of spoken Hebrew had emerged in the markets of Jerusalem between Jews of different linguistic backgrounds to communicate for commercial purposes. This Hebrew dialect was to a certain extent a pidgin.                                  

 Near the end of that century the Jewish activist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, owing to the ideology of the national revival (שיבת ציון, Shivat Tziyon, later Zionism), began reviving Hebrew as a modern spoken language. Eventually, as a result of the local movement he created, but more significantly as a result of the new groups of immigrants known under the name of the Second Aliyah, it replaced a score of languages spoken by Jews at that time. Those languages were Jewish dialects of local languages, including Judaeo-Spanish (also called "Judezmo" and "Ladino"), Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic and Bukhori (Tajiki), or local languages spoken in the Jewish diaspora such as Russian, Persian and Arabic.  Yiddish, spoken by Eliezer, was a mixture of Hebrew, German and possibly a little Russian/Eastern European.  

Abraham spoke Hebrew.  His neighbors and customers spoke Sumerian.   His family was most likely distinguishable from others in Ur by his accent. He must have been bi-lingual if not tri-lingual.   Sumerian (𒅴𒂠 EME.G̃IR₁₅ "native tongue") is the language of ancient Sumer and a language isolate that was spoken in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). During the 3rd millennium BC, an intimate cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians and the Semitic-speaking Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian and the East Semitic language Akkadian on each other is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a substantial scale to syntactic, morphological, and phonological convergence. This has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the third millennium BC as a Sprachbund.  Abraham was born in 1948 BCE.                      

          Left: Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform syllabary, used by early Akkadian rulers.          Right:Seal of Akkadian Empire ruler Naram-Sin (reversed for readability), c. 2250 BC. The name of Naram-Sin (Akkadian: 𒀭𒈾𒊏𒄠𒀭𒂗𒍪: ^DNa-ra-am ^DSîn, Sîn being written 𒂗𒍪 EN.ZU), appears vertically in the right column. British Museum.

Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language around 2000 BC (the exact dating being subject to debate),but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Akkadian-speaking Mesopotamian states such as Assyria and Babylonia until the 1st century AD. Thereafter it was likely forgotten until the 19th century, when Assyriologists began deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions and excavated tablets left by these speakers.

                                                    

       Hebrew, Arabic and English signs throughout Israel

 Arabic is a Semitic language and therefore shares similarities with other Semitic languages, such as Aramaic and Hebrew. In terms of writing, several languages use the Arabic alphabet, such as Persian/Farsi, Urdu, Pashto and Kurdish.  This happens to vet the Torah, that tells us that Abram first took Sarai's Egyptian hand-maiden, Hagar as wife to produce his first child, since Sarai had been barren.  At that time they were living in a tent, so must have been on the outskirts of Ur.  Ishmael was born. 

 The goal of this story was to stress the relationship between the Israelites and Ishmaelites and to account for the nomadic nature of the Ishmaelites.  Today, Israel's occupants know both languages, and many can include English as well.  It's nothing for many to be mult-lingual, Hebrew Arabic, French, English, etc.  

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language

  

  

Unfailing Hebrew After Living in a World of Languages--A People With Their Language

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                    

Writing in clay tablets 

Jews started off speaking Hebrew as Habirus, a Semitic language of Semites 4,000 years ago, and have returned to their homeland finally where they revived their language as well.  Hebrew, Moabite and Phoenican languages belong to the Canaanite branch of Semitic languages.  People were speaking Hebrew in Canaan before the Israelite conquest.
                                                                           

Ancient style from Babylonian days-Aramaic Hebrew

Before Jews were exiled by the Assyrians in 721 BCE, they were speaking biblical Hebrew which was a standardized literary language with distinct idioms for prose and poetry, full-sounding, rich in vocabulary and rhetorical devices.  It borrowed many words from the surrounding languages of their neighbors.  There seems to have been a slightly different standard language in the northern kingdom of Israel from that of Judah.
                                                                           

Possibly didn't leave spaces between words, no period, either

Nadene Goldfoot
Biblical Hebrew continued to be spoken after the Assyrian exile for over 500 years, but showed many signs of decay and uncertainty in usage.  The reasons were the influence of Aramaic from 539 to 331 BCE, the language of officialdom which was spoken by many Jews then.  Also, mishnaic Hebrew emerged as a new colloquial language from at least 200 BCE..  Mishnaic Hebrew is not derived from biblical Hebrew but was probably from some pre-exilic colloquial dialect.  It became a literary language through the tannaim in the 1st century CE.  Speaking in Mishnaic Hebrew declined after the wars of 66-70 at the fall of Jerusalem and especially after 132-135 when Bar Kokhba's fight to regain Jerusalem ended with his death.
                                                                     

Evolving letter A-aleph

The language became more sober, simple and brief than biblical Hebrew had been and was better suited for more precise expression.  The prayers  composed during the Tannaitic Period combined biblical Hebrew vocabulary with Mishnaic Hebrew grammar.  Almost all later styles mixed the 2 dialects.
                                                                         

Early Aramaic

After the year 200, even the Jews of  Palestine (now named as such by the Romans after 135) stopped using Hebrew and wrote in Aramaic and Greek.  In about  the year 500, a literary revival began which led to the use of Hebrew in its written form throughout the Middle Ages.  Starting in Palestine, writers enriched Hebrew by inventing new words  and made some daring grammatical innovations.  Hebrew again spread throughout all of European Jews.  From 900-1400, Jews of NW Europe wrote only Hebrew.
                                                                               

Dead Sea Scrolls, written around 1st century CE or a little earlier

In Moslem countries including Spain, biblical Hebrew  was used for artistic writing and Arabic for other purposes.  From 1100 to 1400 they were using a strongly arabicized scientific style.  This and biblical Hebrew was found after 1500 in Italy, then Holland.
                                                                             

Eastern European Jews use Aramaic while women and the uneducated wrote in Yiddish.  The Haskalah of 1750-1880 revived the use of biblical Hebrew.  They even wrote modern secular literature in Hebrew.  Jewish nationalism rose by 1880 with the first aliyah returning to Palestine and modern Hebrew was born.

What a trip they've had.  Because of their often time forced migrations, Jews had to pick up many languages, and of course as they coursed through different lands and stayed for a while, had to pick up the vernacular of that land.
                                                                         

Israelites led away by Assyrians from Israel

For many, their first exile was in 722 BCE by the Assyrians.  By continuing their religious practices handed down by Moses, they kept their Hebrew language as everything was said in Hebrew.
                                                                         

When the Talmud was written, they were writing in Aramaic and Targum. There were 2; the Babyloninan Talmud-before 500 CE and the Palestinian Talmud-before 400 CE; records of disussion and administration of the laws
                                                                             

Jews of Persian Azerbaijan, Iraq and Persian Kurdistan kept on speaking an eastern Neo-Aramaic.
Egyptian Jews in 3rd century BCE (300s BCE) were now speaking Greek, but with Hebraisms and Aramaisms.
                                                                             

When Cyrus conquered Jews, they had to speak Persian. in old Persian dialect, even when Persians were speaking Middle Persian/Pehlevi.
Caucasian Mountain Jews spoke a type of Tat-a type of medieval Iranian dialect, or Farsi (spoken today in Iran.
Jews in central Asia spoke Tajaiti, another Iranian dialaect.
Georgian Jews spoke the language of their Gruzinian native population but with Hebrew expressions and forms.
Jews in Arabia by 7th and 8th centuries CE wound up speaking Judeo-Arabic.  Their speech differed from the common speech with Jewish vernaculars and many variations. They produced some of the greatest Jewish works in Arabic.
North African Jews spoke Arabic.
Jews in Iraq and Yemen were speaking Arabic, the language of the land.
Jews in Khazaria would have had to have been multi-lingual speaking many languages since they were traders, business men needing Arabic, Hebrew, and the languages around Russia.
Ethiopian Jews spoke Kuarena and are or were versed in Amharic with religious ceremonies done in a variation of Ge'ez.
Jews of the Western Roman Empire who became Ashkenazis wound up speaking Low Latin which then gave way to Old French to Italian in its various dialects to Provencal, and above all to Spanish in the Castilian form which then dominated all.

1492 Sefer Torah from Spain

 This then gave rise to Ladino, which Jews of Spain spoke.
Portugese Jews moved to Marrano/Anusim colonis in Western Europe and America from 16th to 18th centuries CE.
Jews in South and Central America spoke Spanish.
Ashkenazi Jews spoke German as that was the first country after Rome that they settled in and this turned into Yiddish a mixture of Hebrew and German, starting at end of 9th century.  Yiddish with different accents was then used all over Europe and has been the language of important literature.
American, Canadian  and British Jews  speak English. I must say that when I lived in Israel (1980-1985), there were times that as an American I could hardly understand some of the British Jews with their strong accents.  They used a few different words than we did, as well for certain things.
Russian Jews have tried to move to Israel, but those left still speak Russian
                                                                       

Torah, always in Hebrew-Cohens called up first to read from it

Israelis today again speak Hebrew and frown upon using Yiddish as that was the language of the Diaspora, living outside of the land of Israel.
                                                                               

It was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a man from Luzhky, Lithuania born in 1858 who decided that returning Jews would speak Hebrew in their re-established state.  He himself, like all Jewish children then learned Hebrew from about the age of 5 as part of their thoroughly religious upbringing in their own schools.  He ended up finishing his education in a Russian gymnasium in 1877 when Russia proclaimed war on the Ottoman Empire to help our their fellow Slavs, the Bulgarians, to regain their independence from the Turks.  Revivals of many older lands were occurring then;  Bulgaria, Greeks in 1829, Italians in 1849 and felt that if the Bulgarians could do it, so could the Jews.  He was really the start of Zionism for he felt that the Jews must return to their land and speak their own language again.
                                                                         

He left Russia in 1878 and came down with Tuberculosis.  That stopped his plans to study medicine to be more useful in Palestine, but went there anyway in 1881.  He had been speaking Hebrew with everyone he met.  He spoke in Hebrew with his wife.  They got off the boat in Jaffa and spoke with everyone in Hebrew.  They spoke only Hebrew with their son in 1882.  Eventually, the whole state was speaking Hebrew by 1948.  .

Resource: The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
ttps://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/ben_yehuda.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Ben-Yehuda
Letters From Israel by Nadene Goldfoot

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