Hebrew is one of the oldest languages still in use today as a modern, living language. Hebrew originated in the Middle East over 5000 years ago and its earlier versions was the language of Moses and Jesus and the language in which the Bible was originally written. Over the centuries, the language and it’s alphabet have undergone many changes and developments.
For a long period of time, its use as an everyday spoken language died out and it was used, primarily, as a language of prayer by the Jews living in the Diaspora. Towards the beginning of the 20th century, when the modern day Zionist movement began to gather momentum, Zionist Jews began to revive the language as a spoken one, a language of every day communication. Perhaps the one person most credited with the rebirth of modern Hebrew is Itamar Ben Yehuda who was responsible for the first modern Hebrew dictionary using the Hebrew alphabet and who invented many new words to cope with modern developments that did not exist in biblical times. Today, Hebrew is spoken by over 6,000,000 Jews in Israel and many thousands more across the world.
