Hebrew: A Script Reborn After Two Millennia
Hebrew is one of the very few languages in history to have been revived as a living vernacular after centuries of use only as a liturgical tongue. The script that encodes it — the square Hebrew alphabet developed during the Babylonian exile — is equally ancient, yet today it fills newspapers, billboards, and smartphones in modern Israel.
Square Script and Its Origins
What we call the Hebrew alphabet today is technically the Assyrian or "square" script, adopted by Jewish communities during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE. It descended from the Aramaic branch of the Phoenician alphabet, which itself displaced an earlier Hebrew script (now called Paleo-Hebrew). Paleo-Hebrew is still used in specialized religious contexts and on the Israeli shekel coin.
The Hebrew script is an abjad: it writes 22 consonants, with vowel diacritics (niqqud) added optionally. Modern printed Hebrew generally omits niqqud except in religious texts, poetry, and materials for learners.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Revival
When Jewish immigrants began settling in Ottoman Palestine in the late nineteenth century, they spoke dozens of languages — Yiddish, Ladino, Russian, Arabic. Ben-Yehuda, a passionate linguist, argued that the only language capable of uniting this diverse population was Hebrew. He coined new words for modern concepts (newspaper, dictionary, towel) and raised his son as the first native Hebrew speaker in perhaps two millennia. When Israel declared independence in 1948, Hebrew was its official language.
Directionality and Typography
Like Arabic, Hebrew is written right to left — a directionality that creates interesting challenges in bilingual texts, web layouts, and mixed-language documents. Unicode's bidirectional algorithm (the "bidi" algorithm) handles the automatic reordering needed when Hebrew and English appear in the same paragraph, though edge cases remain notoriously tricky for developers.
Compare Hebrew and Arabic — two related right-to-left abjads with shared Semitic roots — or browse the full scripts catalog.