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.
Jacob, later given the name Israel, is regarded as a patriarch of the Israelites and is an important figure in Abrahamic religions, such as Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, and Islam. Jacob first appears in the Book of Genesis, originating from the Hebrew tradition in the Torah. Described as the son of Isaac and Rebecca, and the grandson of Abraham, Sarah, and Bethuel, Jacob is presented as the second-born among Isaac's children. His fraternal twin brother is the elder, named Esau, according to the biblical account. Jacob is said to have bought Esau's birthright and, with his mother's help, deceived his aging father to bless him instead of Esau. Later in the narrative, following a severe drought in his homeland of Canaan, Jacob and his descendants, with the help of his son Joseph, moved to Egypt where Jacob died at the age of 147. He is supposed to have been buried in the Cave of Machpelah.
According to the Hebrew Bible, the tribe of Judah was one of the twelve Tribes of Israel, named after Judah, the son of Jacob. Judah was the first tribe to take its place in the Land of Israel, occupying the southern part of the territory. Jesse and his sons, including King David, belonged to this tribe.
Lachish was an ancient Canaanite and Israelite city in the Shephelah region of Israel, on the south bank of the Lakhish River, mentioned several times in the Hebrew Bible. The current tell (ruin) by that name, known as Tel Lachish or Tell ed-Duweir, has been identified with the biblical 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.
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.
The sabbath year, also called the sabbatical year or shǝvi'it, or "Sabbath of The Land", is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah in the Land of Israel and is observed in Judaism.
Biblical Hebrew, also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanite branch of 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 "Hebrew" (ivrit) was not used for the language in the Hebrew Bible, which was referred to as שְֹפַת כְּנַעַן or יְהוּדִית, but the name was used in Ancient 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 to retain 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. Tunisian rabbi and scholar, Rabbi Meir Mazuz, once said of Yemenites that they are good grammarians.
The Paleo-Hebrew script, also Palaeo-Hebrew, Proto-Hebrew or Old Hebrew, is the writing system found in inscriptions of Canaanite languages from the region of Southern Canaan, also known as biblical Israel and Judah. It is considered to be the script used to record the original texts of the Hebrew Bible due to its similarity to the Samaritan script, as the Talmud stated that the Hebrew ancient script was still used by the Samaritans. The Talmud described it as the "Libona'a script", translated by some as "Lebanon script". 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.
The Samaria Ostraca are 102 ostraca found in 1910 in excavations in Sebastia, Nablus led by George Andrew Reisner of the Harvard Semitic Museum. Of the 102, only 63 are legible. The ostraca are written in the paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which very closely resemble those of the Siloam Inscription, but show a slight development of the cursive script. The primary inscriptions are known as KAI 183–188.
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.
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 or Lachish Ostraca, sometimes called Hoshaiah 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.
Modern Hebrew grammar is partly 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.
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.
The Arad ostraca, also known as the Eliashib Archive, is a collection of more than 200 inscribed pottery shards found at Tel Arad in the 1960s by archeologist Yohanan Aharoni. Arad was an Iron Age fort at the southern outskirts of the Kingdom of Judah, close to Beersheba in modern Israel.
