Yes — **Hebrew came very close to disappearing as a normal spoken language**, but saying it was ever completely “dead” is misleading.

For roughly **1,500–2,000 years before modern Hebrew**, Hebrew largely ceased to be the everyday spoken language of most Jews. It remained very much alive as a **written, religious, scholarly, and literary language**.

A rough timeline:

* **c. 1000–500 BCE:** Biblical Hebrew was a major spoken and written language in ancient Israel/Judah.

* **Second Temple period (516 BCE–70 CE):** Aramaic increasingly became the everyday language of many Jews, while Hebrew remained important.

* **After ~200 CE:** Hebrew was no longer generally the everyday vernacular of Jewish communities. Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, Yiddish, Ladino, etc. became dominant depending on location.

* **Middle Ages:** Hebrew continued to be extraordinarily productive in religious scholarship, poetry, philosophy, correspondence, and literature. So it wasn't "dead" in the same sense as a language that nobody could use.

* **18th–19th centuries:** Jewish intellectuals began deliberately promoting Hebrew as a modern literary and eventually spoken language.

* **Late 19th/early 20th century:** Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and others were central to turning Hebrew into a modern vernacular.

* **1948:** When Israel was founded, Hebrew was already being spoken by hundreds of thousands of people in Mandatory Palestine and had become a functioning modern language.

### The really unusual part

Hebrew is one of the best examples of a **language revived as an everyday mother tongue after centuries without being the normal vernacular**.

But there was never a point where Hebrew simply vanished.

Think of it more like:

**Ancient spoken language → increasingly replaced as everyday speech → survives continuously as a literary/religious language → deliberately revived as a spoken language → modern national language.**

That's why linguists often call modern Hebrew a **language revival**, rather than simply saying Hebrew was "brought back from the dead."

And there's an important wrinkle: **modern Hebrew isn't just Biblical Hebrew spoken again.** Its vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and syntax were substantially reshaped during the revival, with influences from languages spoken by the Jewish communities involved—especially European languages, Arabic, and others.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5891011&forum_id=2Reputation#50055540)

otherwise it's the same language!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5891011&forum_id=2Reputation#50055544)