CHAPTER IV.
HEBREW LITERATURE.
The Semitic Languages, enumerated on page 16, have certain peculiarities in common:—
They are triliteral, i. e. three consonants enter into the composition of every root. Consonants only are represented by letters; vowels, indicated by points and lines, play a subordinate part. The latter vary according to the relation to be expressed; while the consonant root, which conveys the leading idea, remains for the most part unchanged. Thus, in Arabic, the notion of bloodshed is expressed by the triple root q t l; quatl is murder; quitl, enemy; uqtul means to kill; quatala, he kills. The picturesque compounds, so convenient in the Indo-European languages, are here wanting.
The Semitic verb is deficient in mood-forms, and has in general only two tenses, which represent action completed and action continuing. Case, in the later developments of the different languages, is left undistinguished. Brevity is gained, but at the expense of precision.
Distribution of the Semitic Tongues.—The great divisions of the Semitic family of languages are designated as Northern and Southern Semitic. They include the Arama’ic, Hebræo-Phœnician, and Arabic, which are much more alike than the Aryan tongues. Assyrio-Babylonian occupies a peculiar position between the Northern and Southern Semitic groups.
Aramaic (from the Hebrew Arâm—highlands) was spoken in northern Syria, Mesopotamia, and Babylonia. A dialect of it, the Jews gradually adopted after their return from captivity at Babylon (536 B.C.), retaining the Hebrew as their sacred language, but speaking and writing in Aramaic somewhat modified by Greek. Aramaic, therefore, was the tongue in which our Lord and his disciples conversed.
The Hebræo-Phœnician was spread over Palestine, and included the dialects of the Ammonites, Moabites, and Philis’tines. Samaritan was a development of the Western Aramaic, corrupted by the speech of foreign settlers introduced into the land of Israel by the Assyrians, to replace the Ten Tribes whom they had transplanted beyond the Euphrates.
The softer Arabic, musical by reason of its preponderance of vowel sounds, was carried from Arabia into Africa, where it was long the language of the cultivated Ethiopians, and where it still survives in its Abyssinian derivatives, the Amharic, etc.
The Ancient Hebrew shares the imperfections of the Semitic group to which it belongs. It is one of the oldest members of this family, and was long thought to have been the original language of the human race. Its name is derived by some from Heber, ancestor of Abraham and consequently of the people who spoke the classical tongue of the Old Testament; while by many it is believed to mean belonging to the other side, that is, of the Jordan—an epithet applicable to the Chosen People as coming from beyond that river to dispossess the Canaanitish tribes.
