The Story of Hebrew

January 9, 2017
Glinert, professor of Hebrew Studies at Dartmouth, provides an insightful, entertaining, and essential guide to the origins and evolution of the Hebrew language. While doing so, he also makes a convincing case that his subject matter should be of broad interest; Glinert notes that, while “no English speaker today could open a thousand-year-old ‘English’ text and make sense of it” without help, a contemporary Hebrew speaker could read a “three-thousand-year-old chapter of biblical prose and understand it almost unaided.” In detailed yet accessible prose, Glinert explains how that is possible, by tracing how the Hebrew language developed as a social organism. Hebrew was profoundly influenced by how it was used, from the writing of the Hebrew Bible, to its revival, in the 20th century, as a living language as part of the successful Zionist movement to return Jews to their homeland in Israel. The book’s comprehensive scope enables even lay readers to be amused—and edified—by the contrast between the language’s beginnings, with the lyrical language of Genesis, and its current state, with the invention of a Hebrew term for a dispenser for a bag to collect dog poop. This is a must-read for students of language and Jewish history.

Starred review from March 15, 2017
Hebrew is reputedly the oldest living language, its earliest vocabulary still spoken today. Indeed, as Glinert reminds us, Genesis suggests that Hebrew is primordial, for God speaks things into existence with it. Yet it hasn't been continuously used, quite understandably, given the many Jewish diasporas. Jewish majorities adopted the tongue that predominated where they lived and later created in-group languages written with the Hebrew alphabetLadino and Yiddish. Meanwhile, the sages maintained biblical Hebrew; Samaritans kept up Aramaic, whose borrowings from and gifts to Hebrew made it a powerful crib; and Christian scholars (some openly pro-Jewish) deliberately revived Hebrew for their own reasons. Eventually, though Zionism didn't call for it, enough of those who created modern Israel, wanting all Jews to speak Hebrew, made it the national vernacular. Since then, neologisms for technical and other modern communications have been created, primarily out of old Hebrew roots but also by borrowing, from English, in particular. Glinert brings the Hebrew story to life with such a wealth of intriguing cultural detail in so astonishingly few pages of lively, engaging exposition that his account is must reading for all who revel in the history and elasticity of languages.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)