Hebrew Alphabet - History

History

According to contemporary scholars, the original Hebrew script developed alongside others used in the region during the late second and first millennia BCE. It is closely related to the Phoenician script, which itself probably gave rise to the use of alphabetic writing in Greece (Greek alphabet). A distinct Hebrew variant, called the paleo-Hebrew alphabet, emerged by the 10th century BCE, an example of which is represented in the Gezer calendar. It was commonly used in the ancient Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

Following the fall of the Kingdom of Judah in the 6th century BCE, in the Babylonian exile, Jews adopted the Aramaic script, which was another offshoot of the same family of scripts, evolved into the Jewish, or "square" script, that is still in use today and known as the "Hebrew alphabet". The Samaritan script, used in writing Samaritan Hebrew, is descended directly from the paleo-Hebrew script.

The Hebrew alphabet was later adapted and used for writing languages of the Jewish diaspora - such as Karaim, Judæo-Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish, etc. The Hebrew alphabet came again into everyday use with the rebirth of the Hebrew language as a spoken language in the 18th and 19th centuries.