The train and the abyss: Israeli Hebrew and the dialectic of old, new, and in-between

This paper examines the pseudo-restoration of Hebrew and its status in modern Israel as a case study in how an ‘ancient’ language is mobilised for national identity and political myth-making. Originally a regional variant of Canaanite, Hebrew was superseded as a vernacular by Aramaic and ceased to be spoken in late antiquity. However, it survived in written texts and is perhaps best understood not as a language but as a set of linguistic repertoires built around an abstract matrix known as leshon ha-qodesh (the holy tongue). In Jewish tradition, Hebrew was pushed out of human history, endowed with a primordial, atemporal status, and associated with divine creative powers . The modern revival of Hebrew as a spoken language was therefore less a historical restoration than a political reinvention of a quasi-ancient language, fusing religion, nation, and territory into a myth of continuity from antiquity to the present. Today, the promotion of Hebrew as the sole official language of the State of Israel – captured in the Academy of the Hebrew Language’s slogan ‘For we have no other language’ – constructs a narrative of ‘ancient’ monolingual destiny and shapes policies that privilege Hebrew over other languages.