Babel, Hebrew and the Origin of Languages O ne of the questions some readers have asked is, "What was the original language?" This assumes we have all the knowledge back to the origin of humanity, which we don't. Some have even asked if Hebrew was the original language, though the term Hebrew is first known well into what is considered the Historical period of human existence, only about 3500 to 4000 years ago. And the speech we know by that name is clearly a variation of a form of old Phoenician or Canaanite speech. Old Semitic We know the original alphabet used by the language form we know as ancient Hebrew was written in a form of Old Phoenician script, similar to the variation used in south Arabian. The Hebrew examples we have in historical or biblical documents are almost entirely in a script developed in the Babylonian Exile, but two of the thousands of documents found at Qumran in 1948 were in the Old Hebrew script, a version of old Phoenician writing. These