Background to the emergence of spoken Hebrew

This book started with two questions that I am regularly asked, the first (in Israel) about whether Hebrew is endangered, which I tried to answer in Chapter 1. The second is the question that is put to me whenever I meet activists who are trying to maintain or revive their heritage languages: how, they ask, was Hebrew revived? What was the magic? No magic, I tell them, and no miracle, unless it was that a group of secular nationalists chose to use as their daily language a variety that had been preserved for sacred purposes by a religious establishment that mainly opposed both their nationalism and their language policy.

Reading the chapters of this book, you have already learned the basis of my answer, which is that, during the two millennia when Jews were in exile and when they learned and spoke many other languages, Hebrew was almost always a significant part of their linguistic repertoire, as a sacred language for religious purposes and as a language of literacy. It was therefore not a matter of reviving a dead language, reconstructing it from ancient manuscripts (as with Cornish) or from isolated elderly speakers (as with Eyak). What was involved, rather, was the expansion of the domains in which the language was currently being used and an increase in the number of uses and users.