TIMES OF OUR LIVES: IN A MONOMYTHPreview
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HEBREW LANGUAGE

Hebrew (countable and uncountable, plural Hebrews)

  1. (countable) A member or descendant of a Semitic people claiming descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
  2. (countable) A descendant of the biblical Patriarch Eber.
  3. (uncountable) The Semitic language spoken by the Hebrew people.
  4. (uncountable) The writing system used in Hebrew language.
  5. (uncountable, colloquial) Unintelligible speech or writing.

The name Eber is the original eponym of the Hebrew people, from the root ‘abar (עבר‎, עָבַר), "to cross over".[2][3][4]

Hebrew is a Semitic language — like Arabic and Aramaic — and like most ancient Semitic languages its alphabet has no vowels. However, sometime between the middle and end of the first millennium, rabbis known as the Masoretes instituted a system of dots and dashes to indicate how words were to be pronounced.