copious evidence¶

Yes, there's copious evidence of the existence of Hebrew being used long before any liturgical context.

Ancient Hebrew was a member of what we now think of as the Semitic languages, a branch of the Afroasiatic family. Other Semitic languages include Arabic, Aramaic, and Amharic. https://t.co/TvfeVPff1K Hebrew emerged as a dialect of the Canaanite languages, along with the now-extinct Ugaritic and Amorite languages, and likely coalesced as a distinct language some time before 3,000 years ago, around the time that the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Samaria started to form. There have been thousands of Hebrew inscriptions found in the region, starting from the late bronze age and up until the Roman era, covering all manner of daily life -- business dealings, legal missives, curses, burial markers, etc. -- not just religious texts. These writings present a clear evolution over time of the ancient Hebrew script, starting with an adaptation of the Phoenician script, which came to be Paleo-Hebrew, and continued to morph into the script of the Hebrew Bible. Over time, Hebrew's usage as a vernacular did start to disappear, supplanted by Aramaic and later Koine Greek. Hebrew became relegated to a liturgical language by 200 CE at the latest, but could easily have stopped being a vernacular much earlier than that. It's not like acknowledging the existence of an ancient people, who had distinct and evolving cultures, languages, histories, and political systems is some sort of betrayal of the cause of Palestinian liberation. This isn't about ancient history -- that's the Zionist obsession. The problem with Zionism is not that they're "lying," and don't actually have some ancestral, metaphysical tie to the land. The point is that that framing is ridiculous on its face, and should be discarded outright. Also, I'm not even sure what the alternate hypothesis would be to the concept of Hebrew having once been an actual language. Is the idea that, 3,000 years ago, some people decided to invent a language out of nothing, purely to write a holy book? That doesn't even make sense.