Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>]

Regarding the question, when did someone first consider it to be holy, I 
would guess that it arose in the context of 2nd Temple struggles, when 
it needed to be asserted against Aramaic and Greek. In the Talmud (and 
Mishnah) the phrase "holy tongue" is used as a synonym for Hebrew, so it 
must have been established before then. But there is an interesting 
discussion of Hebrew and Aramaic at Sanhedrin 21 that may shed light on 
the notion of holiness applied to language. The rabbis discuss several 
different theories about not only the Hebrew and Aramaic languages, but 
also the respective alphabets. All but one of them recognize that the 
(Paleo-)Hebrew alphabet was used before Ezra. Nevertheless, the 
prevailing view is that the Aramaic (modern "Hebrew") alphabet is the 
holy alphabet (now). The political context of this debate is of course 
the feud with the Samaritans, who continued to use the old alphabet. But 
I bring it up just to show that the argument isn't just about history, 
but about preferred contemporary practice. In the case of the alphabet, 
it's just a matter of Judeans, led by Hillel's crowd who had recently 
come from Babylonia, wanting to snub their rivals. (The discussion in 
Sanhedrin makes this pretty clear.)

Gabe Eisenstein