This entry covers Hebrew beyond its specific Biblical register, encompassing Mishnaic Hebrew, the somewhat later form used to compose the Mishnah around 200 CE and other early rabbinic literature, medieval Hebrew, used extensively for philosophy, poetry and biblical commentary across the Jewish diaspora from Spain to the Middle East, and Modern Hebrew, revived as an everyday spoken vernacular in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine chiefly through the efforts of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda from the 1880s onward, a revival widely regarded as history's most successful deliberate revitalization of a language that had not been anyone's native everyday tongue for well over a thousand years.
Hebrew belongs to the Northwest Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic family, and each of its historical registers shows distinct grammatical and lexical development, with Mishnaic Hebrew notably simplifying some Biblical Hebrew grammar while medieval Hebrew absorbed vocabulary from Arabic, and later Yiddish and other European languages, before modern Hebrew's twentieth-century revival deliberately drew on all these historical layers while coining substantial new vocabulary for contemporary life. Distinct historical pronunciation traditions developed within medieval and early modern Hebrew, most significantly the Sephardic and Ashkenazi systems associated respectively with Mediterranean and Central and Eastern European Jewish communities, and modern Israeli Hebrew's standard pronunciation drew substantially, though not exclusively, on the Sephardic tradition during its early twentieth-century codification.