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The Hebrew language has come a long way since its ancient beginnings. For nearly two millennia, it was and was not a dead language. Jews without another common language spoke it to one another and of course wrote it in their correspondence and their religious and literary works, but the Hebrew they spoke and wrote had barely developed as a living language since mishnaic times, and in this sense may be likened to Church Latin. When my grandfather, a rabbi who came from Bialystok and lived in America for 35 years, tried to speak Hebrew, it was essentially this ancient language with whatever modern phrases and constructions he had picked up from hearing Israeli speech. His Hebrew might be compared to the Modern Greek of a classics professor after a summer or two in Athens, or to my own efforts to speak German, which somehow always come out sounding like Yiddish.
Though the Bible was produced by many hands and written in many styles, biblical Hebrew, at least in its narrative portions, produces an effect of the utmost simplicity and matter-of-factness (we cannot even begin to imagine the spoken language of the biblical street). Strong on repetition, it uses around 9,000 different words (in a total of 600,000) while the King James Version uses 12,000 and Shakespeare, in all his writings, 30,000 (of a total 900,000 words), like Joyce in Ulysses (of a total 265,000). Paradoxically, the "richer" language of the King James Version captures the spirit and dignity of the Hebrew Bible perfectly (unlike such pedantic and lifeless translations as that of the Anchor Bible). This Hebrew is a Western (or northwestern) Semitic language closely related to languages such as Phoenician and Ugaritic (though there is much debate among scholars about classification and connections). The Eastern group, the oldest, includes Old Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian; the Southern (or Southwestern) group includes Arabic; and the Northern (inland Syrian) group includes Amorite and Aramaic, the latter branching off into Western and Eastern Aramaic, the languages of the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, respectively. By the second half of the first millennium BCE, Aramaic had begun to replace Hebrew as the spoken language of the Jews under Persian rule. Perhaps as early as the time of Ezra (fifth...