Early Medieval Hebrew Linguistics

The Beginnings of Hebrew Grammar

Technical works were first composed between the sixth and tenth centuries, primarily in Palestine, discussing and defining the external form of the biblical text, including verse and paragraph divisions, vocalization, and cantillation. Later compositions in Arabic and Hebrew describe the Hebrew language, its phonetics, morphology, and syntax, as well as its relationship to other Semitic languages such as Aramaic and Arabic. The debate among Jews over how and to what extent one might learn about Hebrew from cognate languages like Aramaic or Arabic in these and later centuries highlights the challenges and opportunities of Jewish integration in Islamic society. Hebrew grammar as a field of study was born during this period, and these texts illustrate its development into a systematic discipline.

Hebrew grammar emerged in the tenth and eleventh centuries as a legitimate object of religious study, pursued for the purpose of biblical interpretation. Previously, rules of Hebrew grammar had not even been formulated. Hebrew grammarians now drew on the already richly developed traditions of Arabic grammar and lexicography. The earliest works on the Hebrew language were written by Jews in Arabic. Starting in the twelfth century, when the center of Jewish cultural production shifted to Christian Europe, Hebrew grammar books, now intended for a non-Arabic-speaking audience, began to be composed in Hebrew.

The Masorah and the Masoretes

The development of the Masorah (“tradition”)—a term that, in its broader sense, refers both to the marginal notes transmitted together with the biblical text in order to preserve its integrity and to the vowel and cantillation marks that guide its reading—highlights the importance of the Hebrew Bible as a canonical text. From the seventh century through the tenth, Masoretes (the group of Jews who composed the Masorah) in Palestine sought to establish the correct text of the Bible, adding vocalization and cantillation marks to reflect ancient traditions of pronouncing, chanting, and even understanding the meaning of the text. The consonantal form of the Bible had been standardized since the first century CE, while some graphic signs for vowels and accents were added in the late antique period. The Masoretes then codified the signs as part of the transmitted text. Their work culminated in the Aleppo Codex—produced by the Ben Asher family of Masoretes—which is regarded as the most authoritative biblical manuscript in the world and has survived in fragmentary form.

Early Grammatical Debates about Hebrew Roots

Menaḥem Ibn Sarūq (ca. 920–ca. 970) wrote the first thorough lexicon of biblical Hebrew, the Notebook (Maḥberet), assigning to Hebrew words either one- or two-letter roots. His contemporary Dunash ben Labraṭ (ca. 920/925–ca. 985) harshly criticized the dictionary for its perceived departures from tradition. An earlier lexicographical work, the Egron (Compilation), more limited in its scope, was composed by Dunash’s teacher, Se‘adya Ga’on (882–942), in the early tenth century.

Medieval grammarians divided Hebrew into three parts of speech: noun, verb, and particle. They knew that words consisted of a linguistic base, which was then inflected, but they often disagreed over the base of particular words or how many letters made up a base, or root. Reflecting his reading of Arabic linguistic works, Judah Ḥayyūj (ca. 945–ca. 1012) suggested a root consisting of three consonants. Ḥayyūj’s theory became accepted by nearly all Hebrew grammarians and eventually provided the foundation for the tripartite root system still in use today.

Hebrew Grammar for Poets and Talmudists

The analysis and composition of poetry was another driving force in the study of Hebrew linguistics. Moses Ibn Ezra’s (ca. 1055–ca. 1138) The Book of Conversation and Discussion (Kitāb almuḥāḍara wa-’l-mudhākara) explored Hebrew using Arabic poetics as a guide. Although they did not engage in the same type of grammatical study as their Arabic-speaking Jewish counterparts, Ashkenazic authors, too, especially those of the Tosafist school in northern France—known as Tosafists for their Tosafot (“additions”) to the talmudic text—used lexicographic methods to understand the Talmud, the Hebrew Bible, and Hebrew poetry.