title: Semitic Languages: Features, Structures, Relations, Processes
author:  Gideon Goldenberg 
description: <br />Gideon Goldenberg is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been a Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 1996 and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy since 1999. He has published extensively on Neo-Ethiopian languages, Syriac, Hebrew, and Neo-Aramaic, syntactic relations and typology, and on the history of linguistics in the Middle East.<br />
zlib_text: ch a p t e r 3
  Hebrew
  p. kyle mccarter, jr.
  1.
  HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS
  1.1 The position of Hebrew within the Semitic languages
  Hebrew, the language of ancient Israel and Judah and their descendant Jewish communities,
  is a Northwest Semitic language. Northwest Semitic and Arabic constitute Central Semitic,
  which is a subgroup of West Semitic, one of the two primary divisions of the Semitic branch
  of the larger Afro-Asiatic family (Appendix 1, §§1–2). Within Northwest Semitic, Hebrew is
  classiﬁed as Canaanite as distinct from Aramaic. Other members of the Canaanite subgroup
  include the dialect of the city-state of Ugarit (cf. Ch. 2, §1) in the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–
  1200 BC), and the languages of Israel’s immediate neighbors in the Iron Age (c. 1200–586
  BC), namely, Phoenician (Ch. 4) and the Transjordanian languages of Ammonite, Moabite,
  and Edomite (Ch. 5).
  1.2 Stages in the development of Ancient Hebrew
  Although linguistic features found in the limited surviving evidence f