HEBREW AS A LOST LANGUAGE
So far we have restricted our discussion to manuscripts and texts. What about Hebrew as a language, is it important that the language has been preserved? The answer is a resounding “Yes”, because you can’t separate language from Scripture. If we were to lose the Hebrew language, then we would also lose the Torah. What use is having the perfect preservation of the content of a Scripture if you have lost the meanings of the words it is written in? You wouldn’t be able to properly understand the Scripture; it would be like having a lock without the key.
When we examine the Judaic tradition we learn that Hebrew was a dead language from the second century CE until the foundation of Israel. Ever since the spoken usage of Mishnaic Hebrew ended in the second century CE, Hebrew had not been spoken as a mother tongue [4].
Even though the Torah was originally revealed to Moses over three thousand years ago, the first Hebrew lexicon wasn’t created until the tenth century [5] – some three hundred years after the Qur’anic revelation. They don’t have any dictionaries older than that. They have oral traditions, such as the Mishnah, where they studied the Torah and the meanings of words, but they did not have a systematic lexicography that the Muslims have. This idea seems to have been borrowed from the Muslims. It’s a known fact that in Hebrew studies, Hebrew scholars are forced to go to classical Arabic dictionaries to see what the Arabs had to say about the roots of words. This is because Arabic and Hebrew are both Semitic languages and share many words with similar meaning. This allows Hebrew scholars to get a more ancient understanding of their own root structures [6].