Lashon ha-Kodesh—the holy tongue לשון הקודש

It is usually said of Hebrew that it 'was dead and rose again'. That is half wrong, and the half matters.

It did cease to be spoken: after the destruction of the Second Temple and the Bar Kokhba revolt the people in the Land of Israel spoke Aramaic, and in the dispersion the languages of the places. But as a written language it never ceased. The Mishnah is written in Hebrew—and not biblical Hebrew but its own, mishnaic, with new words and turns: which means the language lived and changed. In it were written piyyutim, commentaries, codes, letters from community to community.

And here is its peculiarity, which no other language of the dispersion has. A Jew of Kairouan wrote to Baghdad in Hebrew, because they had no spoken language in common. For eighteen centuries Hebrew held together people who would otherwise not have understood one another. Petachiah's Sivuv, Obadiah of Bertinoro's letters, responsa to every corner—all of it travelled in Hebrew.

It was described late and not at once. The language had no grammar until the tenth century: that was made in Spain—Menahem ben Saruq, Dunash ben Labrat, Judah Hayyuj, who found the triliteral root, and Jonah ibn Janah, who wrote the complete grammar and dictionary. There is a separate event on this here.

It was made a spoken language again at the end of the nineteenth century, and that is a story of its own—but it did not begin from nothing: what had to be revived was speech, not the language.