Why would the best-selling book of all time be written in two different languages, especially since Jews wrote both parts of it (Old and New Testaments)? How many other books have you read written in two languages? In the ancient world, languages were generally associated with people. It is the Hebrew people who wrote the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew. The fact that the New Testament is written in Greek by Jewish people (who probably spoke Aramaic and Hebrew as well) makes it different from the norm. It reflects the unique political and linguistic situation in the first century AD. Several centuries earlier, the Greek-speaking Alexander the Great came and conquered everyone–including the land of Israel. As a result, many Jews started speaking Greek, and some even started adopting Greek customs. When the Roman general Pompey conquered Israel in 63 BC, Jews had already started writing religious works in Greek. That’s why the New Testament was written in Greek, even though Israel was under Roman (i.e. Latin-speaking) rule during the New Testament period.
We’ve given the simple answer to the question: “What language was the Bible written in?” And we’ve examined the historical backdrop that gave us the Bible in its original form. But we can go deeper. Like most questions, the issues are more complex as you dig into the details. Since these are details about God’s Words to humanity, they are worth digging into. Plus, if you are a language nerd like I am, the fuller story is just plain interesting.
First, the earliest characters in the Bible (everyone in Genesis) wrote nothing. The first instance of the Hebrew word כָּתַב ‘write’ (pronounced kathav) is in Exodus 17:14. There is no writing in Genesis. This largely accords with the evidence we have for the earliest alphabetic writing (which Hebrew adopted), which is now dated to around 2,000 BC and which came from the Sinai peninsula. Abraham lived around 1,800 BC and migrated from Ur (a city in the kingdom of Babylon). If he knew how to write at all, he would have known cuneiform (a non-alphabetic script), and he would have spoken Akkadian (also called Babylonian) and probably Aramaic as well according to the description of him as a wandering Aramean in Deuteronomy 26:5. In the Bible, we have no evidence for anyone writing in Genesis, and it is probably safe to assume that Abraham could not write. All the stories from Genesis, then, had to originally have been passed down in oral rather than written form.
This brings us to our second more complex issue: the fact that most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew does not mean that all the people spoke Hebrew. We’ve already said that Abraham probably spoke Akkadian. That was the language spoken in the area where he was from. This means that at least some of the oral stories of Genesis had to be translated into Hebrew before they could be written down in Hebrew.
In fact, we see evidence of linguistic diversity throughout the Old Testament. In Genesis 31:47, Laban speaks Aramaic to Jacob. Pharaoh has his servants yell an Egyptian word (translated ‘Kneel down!’) before Joseph as he rides in his chariot (Gen 41:43). As a Moabite, Ruth would have spoken Moabite (a language very close to Hebrew). The list could go on and on. The most obvious demonstration of this is the parts of the Old Testament written in Aramaic. Besides our one verse in Genesis, Ezra 4:8-6:18, 7:12-26, Jeremiah 10:11, and Daniel 2:4b-7:28 were all written in Aramaic. After the southern tribe of Judah was conquered, Aramaic began to compete more significantly with Hebrew as the language of the Jewish people, and this is reflected in some of the writings being in Aramaic. This is especially true of the “post-exilic” writings, i.e. those written after the southern kingdom of Judah was exiled to Babylon in the 6th century BC.
This brings us to the time when the Old Testament was written. Have you ever tried to read English written a few hundred years ago? It can be pretty difficult. Take, for example, Beowulf: the anonymous poem written between the 8th and 11th centuries AD. Here’s the opening line: Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Yes, that’s English. No, I also don’t know what it says. To be fair, Hebrew was probably more stable than English over the 1,000 years from Moses’ time to the closing of the Hebrew canon, but it was still about 1,000 years, and the language did change. Our earliest texts are archaic poetry and include Genesis 49, Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32, and Judges 5. All of these have very odd linguistic features that show they are very early. Other texts have late features like Ecclesiastes or the Song of Solomon. Regardless of whether or not Solomon was the originator of the content, the Persian and Greek loan words found in these writings show they are late. There is a lot of diversity even in the Hebrew of the Old Testament.
We could go on and talk about the different dialects of Hebrew (specifically northern vs. southern) and genres, but you probably get the point. The simple answer is true–the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. But the kind of Hebrew that we find there and how it has been influenced by other languages and cultures varies widely from book to book and even passage to passage.
