Dew of Your Youth
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Dew of Your Youth
Six inscriptions and manuscripts in Semitic scripts, from carved stone to an open book

 Reading Semitic Languages with Hebrew

A walk through the Semitic languages of antiquity and of today, read with the background I happen to have: fluent Hebrew, yeshiva Aramaic, learner’s Arabic. The aim is a very basic sense of how much these languages share with one another.
  1. Part 1 Bread, Meat, or a Meal? Hebrew and Arabic as Cousins Oct 20, 2026Hebrew לחם means bread. Arabic لحم means meat. Trying to understand how that happened sent me back to Daniel, the korbanos, and a disagreement between Ibn Ezra and the Ramban.
  2. Part 2 If You Know Hebrew, Do You Know Moabite? Oct 23, 2026A Hebrew speaker reads the ninth-century BCE Mesha Stele without first studying Moabite, keeping the misreadings visible, to see how far Hebrew actually gets you.
  3. Part 3 How Much Phoenician Can I Read with Hebrew? Oct 27, 2026A Hebrew speaker reads Tabnit’s Phoenician curse against grave robbers, carved on a recycled Egyptian coffin, with the guesses and corrections left visible.

Cover photos, cropped, left to right: Mesha Stele by Mbzt, CC BY 3.0; Tabnit inscription by oncenawhile, CC BY-SA 3.0; Nabataean inscription, Louvre AO 4988 (public domain); 11th-century Syriac liturgy (public domain); Mandaic incantation bowl, Royal Ontario Museum, by Daderot, CC0; Beta Israel prayers in Ge’ez, c. 1850, BnF, by Sailko, CC BY-SA 4.0.