Ancient Hebrew writings
Varieties of Hebrew were spoken not only by the ancient Israelites but also in adjacent kingdoms east and south of the Jordan River, where distinct non-Israelite dialects existed, now extinct: Ammonite, Moabite and Edomite.
After the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel had been deported from their homeland following the Assyrian conquest in approximately 721 BCE, an equivalent linguistic shift occurred.
The Hebrew Bible is commonly known in Judaism as the "Tanakh", it being a vocalization of the acronym TNK (תַּנַ"ךְ): Torah ("Teachings"), Nevi'im ("Prophets") and Ketuvim ("Writings").
[9] "Torah" in this instance refers to the Pentateuch (to parallel Chumash, חומש), so called because it consists of five books: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
It is sometimes called the "Five Books of Moses" because according to the Jewish tradition, the Torah, as a divinely inspired text, was given to Moses by God himself on Mount Sinai during the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, which is portrayed as the founding event in the formation of the Israelite religion.
Other than discussing the Exodus itself and the journey to the Promised Land, the Pentateuch has such themes as the origin of the world, of humanity and of the ancient Israelites, the ancestors of modern-day Jews.
The Ketuvim sector of the Hebrew Bible is a collection of philosophical and artistic literature believed to have been written under the influence of Ruach ha-Kodesh (the Holy Spirit).
The oldest manuscripts discovered yet, including those of the Dead Sea Scrolls, date to about the 2nd century BCE.
In secular scholarly circles by the end of the 19th century, a popular proposition regarding the authorship was the documentary hypothesis, which has remained quite influential to this day, despite criticism.
Some books in the Ketuvim are attributed to important historical figures (e.g., the Proverbs to King Solomon, many of the Psalms to King David), but it is generally agreed that verification of such authorship claims is extremely difficult if not impossible, and many believe some or even all of the attributions in the canon and the apocrypha to be pseudepigraphal.
The only descendants of the Israelites who have preserved Hebrew texts are the Jews and the Samaritans and, of the latter, there are but a few hundred left.
[16] Post-Biblical Hebrew writings include rabbinic works of Midrash, Mishnah, and Talmud.
While the Pentateuch is sometimes called the "Written Torah", the Mishnah is contrasted as the "Oral Torah" because it was passed down orally between generations until its contents were finally committed to writing following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, when Jewish civilization was faced with an existential threat.
Karaite Judaism is considered the main contrast to Rabbinic Judaism in our days, but even though Karaites constituted close to half of the global Jewish population around the early 2nd millennium CE,[20] today there but a few tens of thousands left.
The rest of the Gemara, including the discussions of the Amoraim and the overall framework, is in a characteristic dialect of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic.
During the period of the Tannaim (rabbis cited in the Mishnah), the spoken vernacular of Jews in Judaea was a late form of Hebrew known as Rabbinic or Mishnaic Hebrew, whereas during the period of the Amoraim (rabbis cited in the Gemara), which began around 200 CE, the spoken vernacular was Aramaic.
Notable examples: Sefer Yetzirah is arguably the earliest extant book on Jewish esotericism, although some early commentators treated it as a treatise on mathematical and linguistic theory as opposed to Kabbalah.
