You have seen it on a Torah scroll, above the door of a synagogue, on a bottle of Israeli orange juice: those square letters that are read from right to left. Why do Jews call Hebrew the “holy tongue”? Where does its alphabet come from, and how did a language that nobody had spoken in daily life for nearly seventeen centuries become the language of an entire country again? Here is the history and meaning of Hebrew, from the verses of Genesis to the streets of Tel Aviv.
In short: Hebrew (Ivrit) is the language in which almost the entire Hebrew Bible is written, the language of the Torah, the Prophets, the Mishna and Jewish prayer. Tradition calls it lashon ha-kodesh, the “holy tongue”: according to the Ramban, because G-d revealed Himself in this language; according to the Rambam, because it is a pure language, with no coarse words. Its alphabet has twenty-two letters, all consonants, and it is the distant ancestor of our own alphabet. After ceasing to be a spoken language around the 2nd-3rd century CE, Hebrew never stopped being read, prayed, studied and written. At the end of the 19th century it became a living language again, and today it is the official language of the State of Israel.
What does “Hebrew” mean?
The word comes from ivri, “Hebrew”, the name the Torah first gives to Avraham: “Avram the Hebrew” (Bereshit [Genesis] 14:13). The Midrash explains this name in two ways. Ivri comes from ever, “the other side”: Avraham came from the other side of the Euphrates River. But Rabbi Yehuda gives it a deeper meaning: “the whole world was on one side, and he was on the other side” (Bereshit Rabbah 42:8). Avraham, the only one to recognize the One G-d, stood facing an entire idolatrous civilization.
Yet this is not what the Bible calls the language. In the biblical books, Hebrew is called “the language of Canaan”, sfat Kenaan (Yeshayahu [Isaiah] 19:18), or “Judean”, yehudit, the language of the kingdom of Judah. When the envoys of the king of Assyria come to threaten Jerusalem, King Chizkiyahu’s ministers beg them to speak Aramaic, not “Judean”, so that the people on the walls will not understand (Melakhim II [II Kings] 18:26-28). And Nechemiah is dismayed to see children who “can no longer speak Judean” (Nechemiah [Nehemiah] 13:24).
The expressions lashon ha-kodesh, “the holy tongue”, and Ivrit, “Hebrew”, appear in the literature of the Sages, the Mishna and the Talmud (for example Mishna Sotah 7:2). The name “holy tongue” is therefore not in the biblical text itself: it expresses the way tradition looks at this language.
Linguistically, Hebrew is a Semitic language, of the same family as Aramaic, Arabic, ancient Phoenician and Akkadian. Like its sister languages, it is built on roots, usually of three consonants, which carry a basic meaning and branch out into dozens of words. Thus the root k-t-v gives katav (he wrote), mikhtav (a letter), ktav (a script, a piece of writing) and ketubah (the marriage contract). This is one of the keys to the richness of Jewish commentary: through its root, a Hebrew word always points to a whole family of other words.
Why is it called the “holy tongue”?
The question is an old one, and two of the greatest masters of Judaism answered it differently.
The language of Creation
For a whole line of tradition, Hebrew is not merely the language of one people: it is the language in which the world was created. The Torah describes Creation through speech: “G-d said: let there be light, and there was light” (Bereshit 1:3). The Mishna speaks of the “ten utterances” by which the world was created (Pirkei Avot 5:1).
The Midrash brings a proof from the text. When Adam sees the woman, he says: “She shall be called ishah, because she was taken from ish, from man” (Bereshit 2:23). This wordplay only works in Hebrew. Hence the teaching: “just as the Torah was given in the holy tongue, so the world was created in the holy tongue” (Bereshit Rabbah 18:4; quoted by Rashi on Bereshit 2:23). According to the same reading, the names Adam gives to the animals (Bereshit 2:19-20) are Hebrew names, which express the essence of each creature.
The story of the Tower of Babel points in the same direction. “The whole earth had one language and the same words” (Bereshit 11:1). Rashi specifies: this single language was the holy tongue (Rashi on Bereshit 11:1). The scattering of languages came afterwards.
The Ramban: the language in which G-d revealed Himself
The Ramban (Nachmanides, 13th century) explains it as follows: Hebrew is called holy because it is the language in which G-d spoke to His prophets, in which He gave the Torah, and in which His names are written (Ramban on Shemot [Exodus] 30:13). Its holiness comes from above. Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, in the Kuzari, defends a similar idea: Hebrew is the language Adam used, the noblest of languages, and if it became impoverished, it was because of the exile of those who spoke it (Kuzari II, 67-68).
The Rambam: a pure language
The Rambam (Maimonides, 12th century) offers a different and more surprising explanation. Hebrew, he writes, has no specific word for the sexual organs or for the marital act: it always refers to them by allusion, through veiled expressions. It is this modesty of speech, this cleanness, that earns it the name of holy tongue (Moreh Nevukhim, Guide for the Perplexed III, 8). Holiness here is earned: it comes from the way the language is used.
The two explanations are not mutually exclusive. One looks at the origin of the language, the other at its character. Together they say something essential: in Judaism, speech is never neutral. It creates, just as G-d created through speech; and it can become soiled or remain pure.
The Hebrew alphabet: twenty-two letters
The Hebrew alphabet is called the alef-bet, after its first two letters. It has twenty-two letters, from alef to tav, all of them consonants. It is written and read from right to left. Five letters take a special form at the end of a word: kaf, mem, nun, pe and tsadi. The Talmud groups them in a mnemonic, MaNTsePaKh (Shabbat 104a).
What about the vowels?
A Torah scroll contains no vowels at all: only the consonants. The correct reading was passed down orally, from teacher to student. Between the 8th and 10th centuries, Jewish scholars in Tiberias, in Galilee, the Masoretes, developed a system of small dots and dashes placed under, above or inside the letters: the nikud, together with the cantillation marks (te’amim) that indicate the melody of the reading. The most famous manuscript of this school is the Aleppo Codex, written around the year 930. Today, prayer books and children’s books are vocalized; Israeli newspapers and most Israeli books are not, because an experienced reader can work out the vowels.
Letters that are also numbers
Each letter has a numerical value: alef is 1, bet 2, yud 10, kaf 20, kuf 100, up to tav, which is 400. The years of the Jewish calendar are written with letters in this way, as are the chapter numbers in a Hebrew Bible. From these values the Sages drew a method of interpretation, gematria, which links words of equal value. The Mishna counts it among the “side dishes of wisdom” (Pirkei Avot 3:18): it is never a proof in itself, but a way of shedding light on a teaching that rests independently on the meaning of the text.
The ancestor of our alphabet
The English word “alphabet” comes from the Greek alpha-beta, which itself comes from the Semitic names alef and bet. Historians of writing agree on this point: the first alphabetic scripts arose in the 2nd millennium BCE in the Canaanite world, from which came the Phoenician alphabet and the ancient Hebrew alphabet. The Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet, turning certain consonants into vowels; the Romans took it over from the Greeks. Without realizing it, every time we write an A, we are drawing a distant descendant of the alef, whose name means “ox” and which the oldest drawings depicted as an ox’s head.
What the Sages read in the letters
For Jewish tradition, Hebrew letters are not just conventional signs. They carry a teaching.
The Talmud relates that in the days of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, children read the alphabet as a moral lesson: alef-bet, “learn wisdom” (alef binah); gimel-dalet, “be kind to the poor” (gemol dalim). Why is the foot of the gimel turned toward the dalet? Because the one who gives runs after the poor man. And why does the dalet turn its back? So that the poor man receives discreetly, without being ashamed (Shabbat 104a).
The Talmud also teaches that when Moshe went up to receive the Torah, he found G-d busy adorning the letters with small crowns, the tagin, which scribes still draw today on certain letters of the Sefer Torah. From every stroke, he was told, Rabbi Akiva would one day derive heaps upon heaps of laws (Menachot 29b). Nothing in the shape of the letters is left to chance.
Why does the Torah begin with the letter bet (Bereshit, “in the beginning”) and not with alef? The Midrash offers several answers. The bet is closed on three sides and open on only one: one does not speculate about what is “above”, “below” or “before” Creation, but studies from Creation onward. And bet is the first letter of berakhah, blessing (Bereshit Rabbah 1:10).
The mystical tradition goes further. The Sefer Yetzirah, one of the oldest texts of Kabbalah, describes the twenty-two letters as the very elements from which the world was formed. The Talmud says of Betzalel, the architect of the Tabernacle, that he “knew how to combine the letters by which heaven and earth were created” (Berakhot 55a).
This explains why so many biblical texts follow the order of the alphabet. Psalm 119 has twenty-two stanzas of eight verses, one for each letter. Lamentations (Eikha) and the poem of the “woman of valor” (Mishlei [Proverbs] 31:10-31) are also alphabetical. In the Yom Kippur vidui, the Ashamnu confession follows the order of the letters: one acknowledges one’s sins “from alef to tav”.
One language, two scripts
The square letters seen today in a Sefer Torah are not the oldest known Hebrew letters. Archaeology has uncovered an older script, called Paleo-Hebrew, close to Phoenician writing. The Gezer calendar (around the 10th century BCE), the Siloam tunnel inscription in Jerusalem (late 8th century, in the time of King Chizkiyahu) and the two small silver amulets of Ketef Hinnom, which bear the Priestly Blessing (Bamidbar [Numbers] 6:24-26) and date from the end of the First Temple period, are all written in this ancient script.
The Talmud is well aware of these two scripts. It calls them ktav ivri, “Hebrew script” (the ancient one), and ktav ashuri, “Assyrian script”, that is, the square script brought back from the Babylonian exile. Mar Zutra teaches: “Originally the Torah was given to Israel in Hebrew script and in the holy tongue; it was given to them again in the days of Ezra in Assyrian script and in the Aramaic language. Israel chose for itself the Assyrian script and the holy tongue, and left the Hebrew script and the Aramaic language to the commoners.” And who are these “commoners”? Rav Chisda answers: the Samaritans, who to this day still write their Torah in the ancient script (Sanhedrin 21b-22a).
The same passage reports another opinion: according to Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the Torah was given from the very beginning in the square script; the script became corrupted when the people sinned, and then Ezra restored it (Sanhedrin 22a). Either way, since Ezra the scribe, in the 5th century BCE, the square script has been the sacred script of Israel. A Sefer Torah, tefillin or a mezuzah may only be written in this script, by hand, in ink, on parchment.
A language that never died
Hebrew and Aramaic
After the return from the Babylonian exile, Aramaic, the international language of the Persian Empire, settled into the daily life of the Jews. A few chapters of the books of Ezra and Daniel are written in Aramaic. So that the people would understand the Torah reading, it was translated orally into Aramaic in the synagogue: this is the origin of the Targumim, such as Targum Onkelos. Later, the Gemara would be written largely in Aramaic, and the Kaddish is still recited in that language today.
Hebrew, however, remained alive. The Mishna, compiled around the year 200 by Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, is written in a rich and precise Hebrew that linguists call “Mishnaic Hebrew”. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the letters from the time of Bar Kokhba (132-135) show that Hebrew was still used in everyday life. Historians estimate that it ceased to be a spoken mother tongue around the 2nd or 3rd century CE.
Seventeen centuries of written life
But no longer being spoken at home is not the same as dying. For seventeen centuries, wherever they lived, Jews prayed in Hebrew three times a day, read the Torah in Hebrew every Shabbat, and studied, wrote and corresponded in Hebrew. Their marriage contracts, their bills of divorce, their letters between distant communities and their responsa (the legal answers of rabbis) were written in Hebrew, or in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic. A Jew from Morocco and a Jew from Poland, who shared no spoken language, could write to each other in Hebrew.
In the Middle Ages, Hebrew even enjoyed a golden age. Rav Saadia Gaon (10th century) wrote the first works of Hebrew grammar and lexicography. In Spain, Rabbi Shlomo ibn Gabirol, Rabbi Yehuda Halevi and Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra wrote Hebrew poems of great beauty, some of which are still sung in synagogues today. Rashi commented on the Bible and the Talmud in a crystal-clear Hebrew; the semi-cursive letterforms in which his commentary was printed still bear his name: “Rashi script”.
In the Jewish languages of the diaspora, Yiddish among Ashkenazim, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) and Judeo-Arabic among Sephardim, Hebrew remained present in every sentence, through hundreds of words borrowed from the vocabulary of the Torah. In these communities, Hebrew was in fact simply called “the holy tongue”, to distinguish it from the everyday language.
The rebirth of modern Hebrew
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda
At the end of the 19th century, the Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah) restored Hebrew to prominence as a literary language. But it was one man, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922), who took the gamble of bringing it back into daily life. Born in the Russian Empire, in what is now Belarus, he arrived in the Land of Israel in 1881. Together with his wife, he decided to speak only Hebrew at home. Their son, born in 1882, is often described as the first child of modern times raised with Hebrew as his mother tongue.
Ben-Yehuda founded Hebrew newspapers, coined or adapted hundreds of words for modern realities, often from biblical or Mishnaic roots, and undertook an immense dictionary, completed after his death. In 1890, together with others, he founded the Hebrew Language Committee, the forerunner of the Academy of the Hebrew Language established in 1953, which still proposes new words today.
A language adopted by an entire people
The success of Hebrew is not owed to one man alone. It was above all the schools of the new agricultural villages, and then the children themselves, who made it a living language. In 1913, a “war of the languages” broke out when officials tried to impose German in a technical institute in Haifa; teachers and students went on strike, and Hebrew won. In 1922, the British Mandate recognized Hebrew as one of the country’s official languages. Since 1948 it has been the language of the State of Israel, spoken today by several million people.
Linguists regard this rebirth as a unique case: no other language has been restored in this way to the everyday use of an entire nation after centuries without native speakers. It was only possible because Hebrew had never disappeared from books, prayer and study.
A debate in the religious world
It must be said honestly: this rebirth was not received the same way everywhere. Many rabbis rejoiced at it. Others, particularly in certain Hasidic or ultra-Orthodox communities, looked unfavorably on turning the language of the Torah into the language of the street, all the more so since the pioneers of modern Hebrew were often far removed from religious practice. This is why, even today, some communities speak Yiddish in daily life and reserve Hebrew for prayer and study. Both attitudes stem from the same respect for the holy tongue.
Hebrew in Jewish life today
Can one pray in another language?
Yes, in principle. The Mishna teaches that the reading of the Shema, prayer and the blessing after meals “may be said in any language” (Mishna Sotah 7:1), and the Shulchan Arukh confirms this (Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chaim 62:2 and 101:4); the commentators specify that one must then understand the language being used. What matters is that the prayer comes from the heart.
Nevertheless, the custom of all communities is to pray in Hebrew. The text of the prayers was fixed by the Sages, every word in it is weighed, and a translation never conveys the full depth of the original. Halachic authorities recommend praying in Hebrew while learning the meaning of the words; anyone who cannot yet read Hebrew should consult a rabbi about the best way to proceed.
What may only be said in Hebrew
Conversely, the Mishna lists a few texts that may only be said in Hebrew, such as the Priestly Blessing (Mishna Sotah 7:2). And a Sefer Torah, tefillin or a mezuzah must be written in Hebrew and in the square script. The Mishna does record an opinion according to which the Torah may be written in Greek (Mishna Megillah 1:8), but in practice, the scrolls read in the synagogue are always in Hebrew.
The day the Torah was translated into Greek
The Talmud relates that King Ptolemy, in Egypt, gathered seventy-two Jewish sages, placed each of them in a separate room and asked them to translate the Torah. Miraculously, they all produced the same translation, including in the rare passages they altered to avoid a misunderstanding (Megillah 9a-b). This is the origin of the Greek translation known as the “Septuagint”.
Yet other sources describe that day as a calamity: “that day was as hard for Israel as the day on which the golden calf was made, for the Torah could not be translated adequately” (Masekhet Soferim 1:7). The 8th of Tevet, the day of this translation, is listed among the ancient days of mourning (Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chaim 580:2). The two accounts do not contradict each other: translation allows the Torah to become known to the world, but every translation reduces an infinite text to just one of its readings.
Is learning Hebrew a mitzvah?
The Sifrei, an ancient midrash on Deuteronomy, comments on the verse “You shall teach them to your children, speaking of them” (Devarim [Deuteronomy] 11:19): when a child begins to speak, his father speaks to him in the holy tongue and teaches him Torah (Sifrei Devarim 46; Rashi on Devarim 11:19). The Jerusalem Talmud goes so far as to say that whoever lives in the Land of Israel, speaks the holy tongue and recites the Shema morning and evening is assured of a share in the World to Come (Jerusalem Talmud, Shekalim 3:3). The Rambam, in his commentary on the Mishna, lists the study of the holy tongue among the mitzvot that seem minor but whose reward is hidden (commentary on Pirkei Avot 2:1).
What Rav Raphaël Benizri teaches
Rav Benizri addresses the Hebrew language in several of his lectures: for him, understanding the Torah means entering into its language. Here are the main ideas of these lectures, faithfully summarized.
Safa and lashon: the language of the lips and the inner language
In his lecture Noach: the Tower of Babel, the Rav starts from a nuance of vocabulary. Hebrew has two words for “language”. Safa means the lips: an outward, functional language. Lashon is the tongue that lies within the palate, inside, the one that refines everything: an inner language. The Rav notes that their numerical values differ by only one, lashon being worth one more than safa. He sees this as a sign that the holy tongue stands one level higher, with the capacity to integrate all other languages and bring them back to their source.
In the same lecture, the Rav sets out the debate between the Rambam and the Ramban. Is language a convention, gradually developed by society to designate objects, or a true creation, the language of the sacred? For the Ramban, it is the language in which G-d manifested Himself to the people of Israel; for the Rambam, it is the cleanness of this language, without vulgar words, that raised it to holiness. The Rav mentions a third idea: Hebrew would be a code, just as chemical formulas designate the components of a substance, so that in every name one should find the constituents of the thing it designates.
He also links this debate to the history of the script: the language suffered a loss of substance, it was translated into Aramaic, and then, when the exiles returned from Babylon in the time of Ezra, it experienced a revival in the script called ktav ashuri, the script of the Sefer Torah.
One language, or a clear language?
For the Rav, the tragedy of Babel is not the diversity of languages, but uniformity: a single interpretation, a single perception, in which a human being counts for less than a brick. The prophet, for his part, does not announce a single language for the end of days, but a clear language: “For then I will give the peoples a clear language, that they may all call upon the name of the L-rd” (Tzefaniah [Zephaniah] 3:9). The Rav explains that the ways in which the nations perceive the world will remain different, but that there exists a language capable of being the common denominator of all these sensibilities: the Hebrew language, just as Avraham is called to be for humanity.
The aleph and the bet
In Bereshit: the beginning of Creation, the Rav stresses that no other alphabet concentrates so much thought in the sign itself. The aleph can be read as a turning propeller: to enter Creation is to enter a continuous movement in which everyone must take on their role. But the Torah does not begin with the aleph: it begins with the bet, the letter of duality. Hebrew, the Rav explains, moves from duality toward unity. That is why, he says, Hebrew books begin on page bet: it is the two that leads to the one, just as two people build a home, a bayit, a word that also begins with a bet.
Translation, a diminished light
In 10 Tevet: the fast that opens the destruction, the Rav returns to the translation of the Torah into Greek. Every language, he says, carries somewhere a strand of prophecy; but Hebrew is the language of Creation, the one through which the Torah was given. Each letter in it is the source of several meanings, and this is what allowed the Sages to develop the thought of the Torah on different levels. Every translation is like a garment, and every garment diminishes the light of the text: the people become “short-sighted”, as it were, no longer seeing things at their source but only at one remove. Hence the Rav’s conclusion: understanding the Torah requires studying it in its original language.
Common misconceptions about Hebrew
“Hebrew is a dead language that was brought back to life.” This is half true. Hebrew ceased to be a mother tongue for centuries, but it never stopped being read, written, prayed and even sometimes spoken between Jews from different countries. That is precisely why its rebirth was possible.
“Modern Hebrew and biblical Hebrew are two different languages.” No. An Israeli schoolchild reads the Bible in the original and understands most of it, something no English speaker can do with a text from the 11th century. The grammar has evolved and the vocabulary has grown, but it is the same language.
“All Jews speak Hebrew.” No. Most Jews in the diaspora speak the language of their country. Many can read Hebrew in order to pray without speaking it fluently.
“Yiddish is Hebrew.” No. Yiddish is a language of Germanic origin, written in Hebrew letters and rich in Hebrew words. Hebrew is a Semitic language.
Frequently asked questions about Hebrew
How many letters are in the Hebrew alphabet?
Twenty-two letters, from alef to tav, all consonants. Five of them (kaf, mem, nun, pe, tsadi) have a different final form at the end of a word. Vowels are indicated, when desired, by dots and dashes added around the letters: the nikud.
Why is Hebrew written from right to left?
This is the writing direction of most ancient Semitic scripts, such as Phoenician, Aramaic and Arabic. The Greeks first wrote in both directions before adopting the left-to-right direction we know. There is no imposed religious reason: it is a legacy of the history of writing.
Why is it called the “holy tongue”?
Because it is the language of the Torah and of revelation, according to the Ramban (on Shemot 30:13), and because it is a modest language, with no coarse words for intimacy, according to the Rambam (Guide for the Perplexed III, 8). Tradition also teaches that the world was created through Hebrew words (Bereshit Rabbah 18:4).
Did Jesus speak Hebrew?
In his time, in Judea and Galilee, Jews mainly spoke Aramaic, but Hebrew was still in use, particularly for prayer, study and part of everyday life, as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Mishna show. Historians believe that most Jews of that period knew both languages.
Is Hebrew hard to learn?
The alphabet can be learned in a few weeks, and reading the prayers comes quickly with practice. The system of three-letter roots, once understood, is a great help in remembering vocabulary. The most demanding part is reading without vowels, which takes getting used to.
What is the first word of the Torah?
Bereshit, “in the beginning”. It begins with the letter bet, not alef, which the Sages discussed at length (Bereshit Rabbah 1:10): Creation opens with blessing, and man is invited to study the world starting from what is given to him.
What does “Ivri”, Hebrew, mean?
The word first refers to Avraham, “the Hebrew” (Bereshit 14:13). It comes from ever, “the other bank”: Avraham came from the other side of the river, and, according to the Midrash, he stood alone on one side facing the whole world on the other (Bereshit Rabbah 42:8).
Further reading
Hebrew is not just a means of communication: it is the language in which the Torah was given, and every word in it opens up a family of meanings. Learning even just the alphabet is already entering into this conversation of more than three thousand years.
- Noach: the Tower of Babel
- Bereshit: the beginning of Creation
- 10 Tevet: the fast that opens the destruction
- Shemot: naming, the meaning of names
- Glossary of Hebrew words in Judaism
- What is the Torah?
- What is the Talmud?
- How do Jews refer to G-d? Hashem, the L-rd and “G-d”
Sources and references
- Bereshit (Genesis) 1:3; 2:19-20; 2:23; 11:1; 14:13
- Bamidbar (Numbers) 6:24-26
- Devarim (Deuteronomy) 11:19
- Melakhim II (II Kings) 18:26-28
- Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 19:18
- Tzefaniah (Zephaniah) 3:9
- Tehilim (Psalms) 119; Eikha (Lamentations) 1-4; Mishlei (Proverbs) 31:10-31
- Nechemiah (Nehemiah) 13:24
- Mishna Sotah 7:1-2
- Mishna Megillah 1:8
- Pirkei Avot 3:18; 5:1
- Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 104a
- Babylonian Talmud, Menachot 29b
- Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 55a
- Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 21b-22a
- Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 9a-b
- Jerusalem Talmud, Shekalim 3:3 (and Shabbat 1:3)
- Masekhet Soferim 1:7
- Sifrei Devarim 46
- Bereshit Rabbah 1:10; 18:4; 42:8
- Sefer Yetzirah, chapter 2
- Rashi on Bereshit 2:23; on Bereshit 11:1; on Devarim 11:19
- Ramban on Shemot (Exodus) 30:13
- Rambam, Moreh Nevukhim (Guide for the Perplexed) III, 8
- Rambam, Commentary on the Mishna, Pirkei Avot 2:1
- Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, Kuzari II, 67-68
- Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chaim 62:2; 101:4; 580:2
- Aleppo Codex (c. 930) and the Masoretic school of Tiberias
- Gezer calendar (10th century BCE); Siloam inscription (late 8th century BCE); Ketef Hinnom amulets (discovered in 1979, Jerusalem)
- Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922), Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew; Academy of the Hebrew Language (founded in 1953)
- Rav Raphaël Benizri, Noach: the Tower of Babel
- Rav Raphaël Benizri, Bereshit: the beginning of Creation
- Rav Raphaël Benizri, 10 Tevet: the fast that opens the destruction
Article by the Pensées Juives editorial team. Passages attributed to Rav Raphaël Benizri are taken from his lectures published on this site.