What language did early Hebrews speak?

Are we even sure from where the early Hebrews originated? 

Originally posted by Vorian Jacob and Abraham, didn't really exist. They are mythic figures

Do we really know that Vorian? Myths are not 100% bullshit. I mean the story might be wild imagination but the people might have actually existed. The cataclysm of Deucalion in Greece for example is a myth in our eyes but there was actually a flood at that period that created the Kopaida lake. 200 years ago there was no real Troy nor Troyans, but the city was finaly found and people reffering to themselves as troyan were revealed in inscriptions.

Then, in that case, what would be the language(s) of a family living in northern Mesopotamia around 1920 BC?

Whether or not the people mentioned in the Bible actually existed (I have serious doubts, which increase the more I research these people), does not change the fact that people *did* live in that area.  The story remains plausible, and I wish to keep this as historically accurate as I can.

As near as I can tell, this was a period of great political upheaval in Mesopotamia, with the Sumerians fighting the Akkadians (and losing), then the Akkadians fighting the Amorites (and losing).  And Canaan appears to have been at the very beginning of the Middle Kingdom.

Assuming the family was originally from southern Mesopotamia during Abraham's lifetime (assuming his existence from 2090 BC until 1915 BC), and then Isaac's line (Jacob and Esau) living in Canaan and Bethuel's line (Rebekah and Laban) living in Aramea .... I'm still not seeing a common language here.  I honestly do not believe, as we were taught in Sunday School, that all the good God-believing Biblical people knew Hebrew as it was passed down from the Garden of Eden.  With so many languages - Egyptian, Akkadian, Hebrew, Hittite, Sumerian - what would people have used as a common language?

Am I even asking the right questions?

The Sumerians had just experienced the final cultural revival after Akkadian rule.

They were not "losing" they were in their death throes, and ended in Abram's lifetime, if your date is correct.

Yes exactly!
His name is not related however to the story. It means "Acts like a wolf" and it is not a unique name attributed just to him. Maybe it was just a rumor, so what they needed was a person. 

Ah, correct! You mean the Arcadocypriot version of the word Lyk, which is used for anything that illuminates. Lycaeon was connected to that and he was the man that turned to a wolf. There was also a shrine of Zeus (Ieron Lycaeou Dios), were it was said that materia lost it's shadow because of the sourceless light! Otherwise, in other dialects the word was phos or pha.

Anyway, we hijaked the thread i think

There's a pretty good tradition for writing novels about mythical persons as if they actually existed. What spring to mind immediately are Mary Renault's series on Theseus The King Must Die and The Bull From The Sea.

The early Hebrews spoke early Hebrew...... try to refute that one.

Father Abraham's, according to the Iraqis, lived in south-east Iskandariya (the city of Alexander-obviously not established then), Babil province, Iraq on the Euphrates river.  It was flat land, better suited to farming, but many choose to heard sheep instead.a A few times a year, a sandstorm would come a few times a year west across the river from the Anbar desert a few miles distant, turning the sky yellow. The sun would beat down hard in the summer, reaching over 140 degrees at times, and keeping over 100 at night, where people would have to sleep on their roofs just to escape a little heat, and your eyes were always looking to the south and the west, looking for clouds..... much like the crocodiles and other creatures do during droughts on the discovery channel. Sometimes dark clouds full of lightning come rolling in, right on time for the rainy season, turning the sky dusty red, cleaning it a bit, and your certain it will rain, but not a drop.... and not another sighting of clouds for several more months, and you wonder, what happened to the rain, why isn't it raining like it did last year?

When the rains do come, they won't stop, they drench you throughly. Temperatures drop to the lower fourties, sometimes even higher thirties, and even with my arctic gear, there was times where I... a Alaskan paratrooper, would fall to my knees shaking..... but only at night.

The architecture is challenging to place.... one house would be Ottoman, a hundred years old, farms well worked, beutiful brick, and across the street, a horrid mud backed, but not mud bricked... I said MUD BAKED house without a straight plain or angle in it, from the door 'angles' to the roof, and you wonder how on earth it managed to stay up. The walls dividing the property was of the same design, compounded dirt, sometimes reed walls sticking out of it, or the ruins of the neighbor's house. No sign of grass or cultivation inside this mud manor, just nastiness, barren, well trodden dirt that wild dogs and chickens played on, with piles of dead vegetation laying here of there that look like they were placed their more out of laziness than in a desire to create compost. A few ,ud huts would stand together in this manor of hell, and a few would have a blue palm tree spray painted on the brown mud wall, a distant, pathetic characture of it's real life counter part pooping up sporadically here and there..... unlike the Ottoman farms, with it's precision planing of them for fruits and wood. A few pop up here and there along the river, forming 1 mile square forests that sheep would roam, but they never grew in abundance far from the river.

To see his land, look up Iskandariya on Google earth, and go southeast to the river..... you should see a power plant with four stacks..... follow the road  following the river closest to the north up TWO checkpoints.... the first one was one the left of the road, the second more to the right, and it's better built up than the first, given it's was recently constructed and not Ad Hoc. That second checkpoint IS exactly where they said it was! They built it right on top (rectangular fish farms are immediately north of this powerplant, hard to miss)..... not to say there was anything of value there before other than a pile of Iraqi trash (middle eastern soda bottles). There are no pilgrimages to it, only to the Islamic sites celebrating battles and horrors inflicted by other Muslims, and the Jews have long, long, long since moved on, not caring about the site..... The site is now on the Shiite, Sunni faultline, so I recommend NOT visiting anytime soon, no matter who you are, cause someone there DOES want to hurt you.

It is not a hard place to live if you can manage the land, rains or not, the river is RIGHT there. But if you don't try, you will fall into poverty quickly.


Edited by Mercury_Dawn - 31-Aug-2008 at 19:13

We had a pretty big discussion last year on the histography of the bible, and what came out was agreement that events from 1000 BC onwards were historically proven, before that, hard to say. I will say this, as nee evidence has come to light it has tended to support

FIOCE
Bible characters REALLY did exist. Rethink Biblical novel/book if you are not a true believer. Good question about languages though. If studying Biblical characters it's a good idea to study previous time periods. Study Genesis chapter 10, commonly called the "Table of Nations." This is just prior to the Tower of Babel. That will help you more than you know. Another option, read Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages. Excellent source.

One who knows.