Aramaic is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, southeastern Anatolia, Eastern Arabia and the Sinai Peninsula, where it has been continually written and spoken in different varieties for over three thousand years.
Hebrew is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a first language until after 200 CE and as the liturgical language of Judaism and Samaritanism. The language was revived as a spoken language in the 19th century, and is the only successful large-scale example of linguistic revival. It is the only Canaanite language, as well as one of only two Northwest Semitic languages, with the other being Aramaic, still spoken today.
The Kingdom of Judah was an Israelite kingdom of the Southern Levant during the Iron Age. Centered in the highlands of Judea, the kingdom's capital was Jerusalem.
Lachish was an ancient Israelite city in the Shephelah region of Canaan on the south bank of the Lakhish River mentioned several times in the Hebrew Bible. The current tell by that name, known as Tel Lachish or Tell el-Duweir, has been identified with Lachish. Today, it is an Israeli national park operated and maintained by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. It lies near the present-day moshav of Lakhish, which was named in honor of the ancient city.
The Amidah, also called the Shemoneh Esreh, is the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy. Observant Jews recite the Amidah at each of three daily prayer services in a typical weekday: morning (Shacharit), afternoon (Mincha), and evening (Ma'ariv). On Shabbat, Rosh Chodesh, and Jewish festivals, a fourth Amidah (Mussaf) is recited after the morning Torah reading, and once per year, a fifth Amidah (Ne'ilah) is recited, around sunset, on Yom Kippur. Due to the importance of the Amidah, in rabbinic literature, it is simply called "hatefila". According to legend, the prayer was composed by the rabbis of the Anshei Knesset HaGedolah. Accordingly, in Judaism, to recite the Amidah is a mitzvah de-rabbanan, i. e., a commandment of rabbinic origin.
Asherah was a goddess in ancient Semitic religions. She also appears in Hittite writings as Ašerdu(s) or Ašertu(s), and as Athirat in Ugarit. Some scholars hold that Yahweh and Asherah were a consort pair in ancient Israel and Judah, while others disagree.
Yibna, or Tel Yavne, is an archaeological site and depopulated Palestinian town. The ruins are located immediately southeast of the modern Israeli city of Yavne.
Biblical Hebrew, also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanitic branch of the Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea. The term ʿiḇrîṯ "Hebrew" was not used for the language in the Hebrew Bible, which was referred to as שְֹפַת כְּנַעַן śəp̄aṯ kənaʿan "language of Canaan" or יְהוּדִית Yəhûḏîṯ, "Judean", but it was used in Koine Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts.
Yemenite Hebrew, also referred to as Temani Hebrew, is the pronunciation system for Hebrew traditionally used by Yemenite Jews. Yemenite Hebrew has been studied by language scholars, many of whom believe it retains older phonetic and grammatical features lost elsewhere. Yemenite speakers of Hebrew have garnered considerable praise from language purists because of their use of grammatical features from classical Hebrew.
The Paleo-Hebrew script, also Palaeo-Hebrew, Proto-Hebrew or Old Hebrew, is the writing system found in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions, including pre-Biblical and Biblical Hebrew, from southern Canaan, also known as the biblical kingdoms of Israel (Samaria) and Judah. It is considered to be the script used to record the original texts of the Bible due to its similarity to the Samaritan script; the Talmud states that the Samaritans still used this script. The Talmud described it as the "Livonaʾa script", translated by some as "Lebanon script". However, it has also been suggested that the name is a corrupted form of "Neapolitan", i.e. of Nablus. Use of the term "Paleo-Hebrew alphabet" is due to a 1954 suggestion by Solomon Birnbaum, who argued that "[t]o apply the term Phoenician [from Northern Canaan, today's Lebanon] to the script of the Hebrews [from Southern Canaan, today's Israel-Palestine] is hardly suitable". The Paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets are two slight regional variants of the same script.
Meṣad Hashavyahu is an ancient fortress on the border of the Iron Age Kingdom of Judah facing the Philistine city of Ashdod near the Mediterranean Sea. It lies 1.7 kilometres (1.1 mi) south of the seaport Yavne-Yam and 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) northwest of the main city of Yavne. The original name of the fort is unknown but was given the name found on several inscribed ostraca recovered at the site. The site covers an area of approximately 1.5 acres (6,100 m2).
Edom was an ancient kingdom in Transjordan, located between Moab to the northeast, the Arabah to the west, and the Arabian Desert to the south and east. Most of its former territory is now divided between present-day southern Jordan and Israel. Edom appears in written sources relating to the late Bronze Age and to the Iron Age in the Levant.
Yehud Medinata, also called Yehud Medinta or simply Yehud, was an autonomous administrative division of the Achaemenid Empire. It constituted a part of Eber-Nari and was bounded by Idumaea to the south, lying along the frontier of the two satrapies. Spanning most of Judea—from the Shephelah in the west to the Dead Sea in the east—it was one of several Persian provinces in Palestine, together with Moab, Ammon, Gilead, Samaria, Ashdod, and Idumea/Arabia, among others. It existed for just over two centuries before the Greek conquest of Persia resulted in it being incorporated into the Hellenistic empires.
Yavne-Yam or Minet Rubin is an archaeological site located on Israel's Southern Coastal Plain, about 15 km south of Tel Aviv. Built on eolianite hills next to a small promontory forming the sole anchorage able to provide shelter to seagoing vessels between Jaffa and the Sinai, Yavne-Yam is notable for its role as the port of ancient Yavne. Excavations carried out by Tel Aviv University since 1992 have revealed continuous habitation from the second millennium BCE up to the Middle Ages; the famous Yavne-Yam ostracon is named after the site.
The Lachish Letters are a series of letters written in carbon ink containing ancient Israelite inscriptions in Ancient Hebrew on clay ostraca. The letters were discovered at the excavations at Lachish.
The grammar of Modern Hebrew shares similarities with that of its Biblical Hebrew counterpart, but it has evolved significantly over time. Modern Hebrew grammar incorporates analytic, expressing such forms as dative, ablative, and accusative using prepositional particles rather than morphological cases.
Biblical Hebrew orthography refers to the various systems which have been used to write the Biblical Hebrew language. Biblical Hebrew has been written in a number of different writing systems over time, and in those systems its spelling and punctuation have also undergone changes.
Nehemiah 10 is the tenth chapter of the Book of Nehemiah in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, or the 20th chapter of the book of Ezra-Nehemiah in the Hebrew Bible, which treats the book of Ezra and the book of Nehemiah as one book. Jewish tradition states that Ezra is the author of Ezra-Nehemiah as well as the Books of Chronicles, but modern scholars generally accept that a compiler from the 5th century BCE known as The Chronicler is the final author of these books. The chapter contains the list of signatories to the people's pledge and the later part deals with intermarriage with the non-Jews among the "people of the land" punctuated with the pledge to separate from "foreigners".
2 Kings 22 is the twenty-second chapter of the second part of the Books of Kings in the Hebrew Bible or the Second Book of Kings in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. The book is a compilation of various annals recording the acts of the kings of Israel and Judah by a Deuteronomic compiler in the seventh century BCE, with a supplement added in the sixth century BCE. This chapter records the events during the reign of Josiah, the king of Judah, especially the discovery of the Book of the Law (Torah) during the renovation of the Temple in Jerusalem.
