The Resurrection of Hebrew

A palm-sized limestone tablet scratched by someone - possibly a schoolboy, possibly a tax collector - who needed to write down when things grew. Two months of harvest, two of planting, a month of flax. No theology, no king, no monument. The language begins its written life doing chores.

What survives is ordinary. That is the point. Ordinary writing means ordinary literacy, and ordinary literacy means a language planted wide enough to last.

Two gangs of tunnel diggers, boring through solid rock from opposite ends to bring Gihon spring water inside Jerusalem's walls before the Assyrians arrived. When they were close enough to hear each other through the stone, one team called out. They met. The inscription they cut on the tunnel wall to mark the moment is the only known building commemoration from ancient Israel - and it sounds like an engineer in a site diary.

Hezekiah's tunnel still carries water today. The inscription - chiselled out by an 1890 thief and confiscated by the Ottoman government - sits in Istanbul, waiting to come home.

Around 200 CE, the last child grew up speaking Hebrew at home. Nobody marked the occasion, because nobody marks that kind of occasion. A language doesn't die at a funeral. It dies at a kitchen table, when a mother answers her child in Aramaic because it's simpler, and the child answers back in Aramaic, and that's that.

But the Mishnah - the oral law compiled into writing around exactly this time - was set down in Hebrew. The language left the kitchen and moved permanently into the study house. It had other arrangements to keep.

For seventeen hundred years - prayed in three times a day, contracted in, versified in, philosophised in, corresponded in across the Cairo Geniza trade routes from Egypt to Aden. Hebrew went into the equivalent of a very long, very active retirement. A merchant in eleventh-century Fustat and a scholar in eleventh-century Worms had no spoken language in common. They could write to each other perfectly well, and did.

Yehuda Halevi wrote his homesickness for a land he had not yet seen - he would travel toward it in his final years, dying somewhere in the East around 1141 - in Hebrew that still stops you cold nine centuries later. Every Jewish boy who learned his letters learned these letters. Nobody knew what they were saving for. It turned out they were saving for 1882.

The new Technion in Haifa was to be taught in German - the language of science, the language of the sponsoring aid agency. The teachers and students went on strike. The question was not merely ideological: Hebrew, until that moment, had no words for the subjects they needed to teach. It didn't matter. They would coin the words as they went.

Hebrew won the vote. A people that strikes over grammar is a people that will be fine.

The language that needed words for a child's whole world - ice cream, newspaper, bicycle, doll - now needs words for everything anyone invents. The Academy of the Hebrew Language still coins them: maḥshev (computer, from ḥashav, "to calculate"), sak-sheni (backpack), doneg (wax). The project Ben-Yehuda started at a desk with tuberculosis and a deadline never stopped.