Page 132 - Attractive Deception - The False Hope of the Hebrew Roots Movement

they served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River, and led him through
all the land of Canaan, and multiplied his descendants...

Abraham was an Aramean. He came from the land of Babylon, the very heartland of idolatry.
Abraham’s language was that of the Babylonians. When Judah and Jerusalem were taken captive to
Babylon 1,400 years after Abraham, they were returning to the land of their forefathers. While Judah
sojourned in Babylon six centuries before Christ, they got a refresher course on the language and
alphabet of Babylon which was Aramaic. The Hebrew language always has been a dialect of Aramaic.

If you understand this, then you may recognize the error of suggesting that Hebrew is a holy language,
or that all mankind will speak Hebrew during the millennial reign of Christ. Babylon has always
represented confusion. It was at Babel that man’s speech was first confused. If Abraham were to sit
down with an Israeli Jew today, they would not be able to recognize one another’s speech. Neither
would they be able to communicate through writing, for they would not recognize the alphabet the
other person was using. In Yahweh’s Book I shared the following.
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We see evidence of the profound changes that occurred in the Hebrew’s speech in an account found
in the book of II Kings. About 1300 years after Abraham’s descendants had been dwelling in Canaan,
King Sennacherib of Assyria laid siege to Jerusalem in the days of King Hezekiah. Sennacherib’s
commander, the Rabshakeh, came out to speak to the Jews, taunting them. The Rabshakeh spoke
openly in Hebrew. One of Hezekiah’s ministers urged the Rabshakeh to speak to Hezekiah’s servants
in Aramaic, for the common people of Judea no longer understood the language.

II Kings 18:26
Then Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, Shebna, and Joah said to the Rabshakeh, "Please speak to your
servants in Aramaic, for we understand it; and do not speak to us in Hebrew in the hearing of the
people who are on the wall."

The speech of Abraham’s descendants was still considered an Aramaic language in Hezekiah’s day,
but we see that it had become so differentiated from the Aramaic of the land of Assyria and Babylon
that most of the Hebrews could no longer understand Aramaic. A century after this, the Jews were
taken captive into the land of Babylon. There they were once more subjected to the Aramaic language.
It became a matter of necessity for the Jews to speak Aramaic so that they could dwell in Babylon,
conduct business, and converse with their Babylonian neighbors. Consequently, when the Jews
returned to Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile they were now speaking Aramaic. While in Babylon,
the Jews also abandoned the Paleo Hebrew alphabet and adopted the Aramaic square script.