The pharyngeal and glottal consonants underwent weakening in some regional dialects, as reflected in the modern Samaritan Hebrew reading tradition.

[12][13] Later, the Achaemenid Empire made Judah a province, Yehud Medinata, and permitted the Judahite exiles to return and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

[12] According to the Gemara, Hebrew of this period was similar to Imperial Aramaic;[14][15] Hanina bar Hama said that God sent the exiled Jews to Babylon because "[the Babylonian] language is akin to the Leshon Hakodesh" in the Talmud (Pesahim 87b).

"[19] The damp climate of Israel caused the rapid deterioration of papyrus and parchment documents, in contrast to the dry environment of Egypt, and the survival of the Hebrew Bible may be attributed to scribal determination in preserving the text through copying.

[31][nb 3] As a Northwest Semitic language, Hebrew shows the shift of initial */w/ to /j/, a similar independent pronoun system to the other Northwest Semitic languages (with third person pronouns never containing /ʃ/), some archaic forms, such as /naħnu/ 'we', first person singular pronominal suffix -i or -ya, and /n/ commonly preceding pronominal suffixes.

[29] The Northwest Semitic languages formed a dialect continuum in the Iron Age (1200–540 BCE), with Phoenician and Aramaic on each extreme.

[29][35] Hebrew also shares with the Canaanite languages the shifts */ð/ > /z/, */θʼ/ and */ɬʼ/ > /sʼ/, widespread reduction of diphthongs, and full assimilation of non-final /n/ to the following consonant if word final, i.e. בת /bat/ from *bant.

[29] There is also evidence of a rule of assimilation of /j/ to the following coronal consonant in pre-tonic position, shared by Hebrew, Phoenician and Aramaic.

[36] Typical Canaanite words in Hebrew include: גג "roof" שלחן "table" חלון "window" ישן "old (thing)" זקן "old (person)" and גרש "expel".

[40] Biblical poetry uses a number of distinct lexical items, for example חזה for prose ראה 'see', כביר for גדול 'great'.

[38][39] Late Biblical Hebrew shows Aramaic influence in phonology, morphology, and lexicon, and this trend is also evident in the later-developed Tiberian vocalization system.

[62][63][64] The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet's main differences from the Phoenician script were "a curving to the left of the downstrokes in the "long-legged" letter-signs... the consistent use of a Waw with a concave top, [and an] x-shaped Taw.

"[62][nb 7] The oldest inscriptions in Paleo-Hebrew script are dated to around the middle of the 9th century BCE, the most famous being the Mesha Stele in the Moabite language (which might be considered a dialect of Hebrew).

[65] In the Second Temple Period the Paleo-Hebrew script gradually fell into disuse, and was completely abandoned among the Jews after the failed Bar Kochba revolt.

[63] Some Qumran texts written in the Assyrian script write the tetragrammaton and some other divine names in Paleo-Hebrew, and this practice is also found in several Jewish-Greek biblical translations.

The old Babylonian vocalization system wrote a superscript ס above the ש to indicate it took the value /s/, while the Masoretes added the shin dot to distinguish between the two varieties of the letter.

[70][71] The original Hebrew alphabet consisted only of consonants, but the letters א, ה, ו, י, also were used to indicate vowels, known as matres lectionis when used in this function.

[72] Phoenician inscriptions from the 10th century BCE do not indicate matres lectiones in the middle or the end of a word, for example לפנ and ז for later לפני and זה, similarly to the Hebrew Gezer Calendar, which has for instance שערמ for שעורים and possibly ירח for ירחו.

[72] Of the extant textual witnesses of the Hebrew Bible, the Masoretic text is generally the most conservative in its use of matres lectionis, with the Samaritan Pentateuch and its forebearers being more full and the Qumran tradition showing the most liberal use of vowel letters.

This is observed by noting the preservation of the double phonemes of each letter in one Sephardic reading tradition, and by noting that these phonemes are distinguished consistently in the Septuagint of the Pentateuch (e.g. Isaac יצחק Yīṣḥāq = Ἰσαάκ versus Rachel רחל Rāḫēl = Ῥαχήλ), but this becomes more sporadic in later books and is generally absent in translations of Ezra and Nehemiah.

The specific pronunciation of /ś/ as [ɬ] is based on comparative evidence (/ɬ/ is the corresponding Proto-Semitic phoneme and still attested in Modern South Arabian languages[71] as well as early borrowings (e.g. balsam < Greek balsamon < Hebrew baśam).

In Samaritan Hebrew, /ʔ ħ h ʕ/ have generally all merged, either into /ʔ/, a glide /w/ or /j/, or by vanishing completely (often creating a long vowel), except that original /ʕ ħ/ sometimes have reflex /ʕ/ before /a ɒ/.

[96] In the Tiberian tradition /ħ ʕ h ʔ r/ cannot be geminate; historically first /r ʔ/ degeminated, followed by /ʕ/, /h/, and finally /ħ/, as evidenced by changes in the quality of the preceding vowel.

Both Hebrew and Arabic had a special form of nunation/mimation that co-occurred with the dual and masculine sound plural endings whenever the noun was not in the construct state.

(The strong feminine endings in Classical Arabic are -ātu nominative, -āti objective, marked with a singular-style -n nunation in the indefinite state only.)

For example, in the suffix conjugation, first-singular *-tu appears to have been remade into *-tī already by Proto-Hebrew on the basis of possessive -ī (likewise first singular personal pronoun *ʔana became *ʔanī).

[119][nb 25][120] Vowels in open or stressed syllables had allophonic length (e.g. /a/ in יְרַחֵם /jəraˈħem/ [jəraːˈħeːm] ('he will have mercy') < previously short [jəraˈħeːm] < [jəraħˈħeːm] by Tiberian degemination of /ħ/ < PSem */juraħˈħimu/).

[138][146] In the Tiberian tradition an ultrashort echo vowel is sometimes added to clusters where the first element is a guttural, e.g. יַאֲזִין /jaʔăzin/ ('he will listen') פָּעֳלוֹ /pɔʕɔ̆lo/ ('his work') but יַאְדִּיר /jaʔdir/ ('he will make glorious') רָחְבּוֹ /ʀɔħbo/ 'its breadth'.

[154] In proto-Semitic nouns were marked for case: in the singular the markers were */-u/ in the nominative, */-a/ in the accusative (used also for adverbials), and */-i/ in the genitive, as evidenced in Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Arabic.

[162] Hebrew has a morphological dual form for nouns that naturally occur in pairs and for units of measurement and time which contrasts with the plural (יוֹם 'day' יוֹמַיִם 'two days' יָמִים 'days').