Part 2

1. Ugaritic: This language has significantly improved our understanding of the Hebrew grammar and vocabulary. It too was a northwestern Semitic language closely related to Hebrew and similiar to the language of the Canaanites (by comparison, Akkadian was a northeastern Semitic language and somewhat more distant Hebrew). Ugaritic employed an alphabetic cuneiform(i.e., used cuneiform signs to represent individual letters) and is preserved in approximately 1,300 administrative, economic and religious documents from the fourteenth to the thirteenth centuries B.C.

2. Aramaic: This language spans at least the last 3,000 years of the Old Testament period. Like Hebrew and Ugaritic, it was a northwestern Semitic language. Aramaic utilized a 22 letter alphabet borrowed from the Phoenician Language. It became the international language of communication for the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians during the first millennium B.C. The Persian Empire's "standardized" Aramaic has been dubbed Imperial Aramaic - the dialect of the governmental communique in Ezra 4. The books of Ezra and Daniel were partially written in Aramaic, and traces of Aramaic are scattered throughout the Old Testament.

3.Hebrew: Hebrew uses the same alphabet as Aramaic. Attested outside of the Bible from the tenth century B.C., it was the language of the Israelites and of most of the Old Testament. Although the present Old Testament is primarily rendered in a standard Biblical Hebrew, traces of ancient Hebrew dialects are apparent in the text (e.g., Jdg 12:6) During the intertestamental period Aramaic gradually replaced Hebrew as the spoken language of the Jews (Jesus spoke Aramaic, e.g., MT 27:46). A modern version of Hebrew is spoken by Israelis today, but it has a number of substantial differences from the classical form.


Taken from page 672 in the Archaeological Study Bible