sometimes i remember that hebrew was literally a dead language. dead!! for two thousand years!!!! until this one guy in the 1880′s was like hey fuck german and russian and spanish and french We Are Jews we should speak The Language Of The Jews!! and everyone was like dude tf hebrew is DEAD it’s OLD it’s missing too many words, we can’t use it. so he was like ok. i’ll make up new ones. checkmate, atheists and he fuckninh did he stood up by his little desk (?) and invented so many new words and wrote a whole dictionary and then he had a child and only spoke hebrew to him and that child was the first person who’s first language was hebrew in two thousand years and…………………………… i’m sorry i’m so emotional over my man, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. he singe-handedly revived a dead language. what a man
Hebrew did have the advantage of, unlike the vast majority of other dead languages, being in liturgical use (as it is today) and, as Judaism (unlike most branches of Christianity with non-vernacular liturgy) has always encouraged literacy in it (at least for men) meaning there was still a large body of people with some familiarity with Hebrew, moreso than was ever really the case with any other dead language
That said, Hebrew had ceased being the everyday language of the people with the Babylonian exile being replaced by Aramaic about 2500 years before Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. The closest analogue I can find to that time gap that anyone would have heard of is if someone brought back Luwian (the language of the late Hittite Empire) to a living language
