The Story of Hebrew

Glinert, professor of Hebrew Studies at Dartmouth, provides an insightful, entertaining, and essential guide to the origins and evolution of the Hebrew language. While doing so, he also makes a convincing case that his subject matter should be of broad interest; Glinert notes that, while “no English speaker today could open a thousand-year-old ‘English’ text and make sense of it” without help, a contemporary Hebrew speaker could read a “three-thousand-year-old chapter of biblical prose and understand it almost unaided.” In detailed yet accessible prose, Glinert explains how that is possible, by tracing how the Hebrew language developed as a social organism. Hebrew was profoundly influenced by how it was used, from the writing of the Hebrew Bible, to its revival, in the 20th century, as a living language as part of the successful Zionist movement to return Jews to their homeland in Israel. The book’s comprehensive scope enables even lay readers to be amused—and edified—by the contrast between the language’s beginnings, with the lyrical language of Genesis, and its current state, with the invention of a Hebrew term for a dispenser for a bag to collect dog poop. This is a must-read for students of language and Jewish history. (Mar.)