Hebrew: The Language of Eden – Common Origin of All Languages?

“The Semitic languages also are all varieties of one form of speech. Though we do not know that primitive language from which the Semitic dialects diverged, yet we know that at one time such language must have existed. . . . We cannot derive Hebrew from Sanskrit, or Sanskrit from Hebrew; but we can well understand how both may have proceeded from one common source. They are both channels supplied from one river, and they carry, though not always on the surface, floating materials of language which challenge comparison, and have already yielded satisfactory results to careful analyzers.”

~Max Müller, “Outlines of Philosophy of History,” vol. i., p. 475.

Edenics

“Hebrew is the language of Eden, and this is what the Jews have always believed. They call it L’shon HaKodesh which means The Holy Language”

This article discusses the possibility that Hebrew might have been the original language of the world, before the dispersion from Babylon.

Since the publication of my book, Forgotten History of the Western People, some of my readers have pointed out that the original world language, before the dispersion from the Tower of Babel, might have been Hebrew. They believe that Hebrew was the original language of the garden of Eden, and the study of this subject is called “Edenics”. They also believe that many English words are derived from Hebrew. When I first heard of this, I found it a bit strange because English is an Indo-European language, and Hebrew is Semitic, and the notion of the Hebrew roots of the English language runs contrary to modern thinking of linguistics. I wondered if it might be just another fanciful idea from the British Israelites, who believe that the British people are descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel, placing them in a special covenant relationship with God. However, I found that the supporters of Edenics are not British Israelites and they are not trying to prove any religious doctrine.

So, I decided to look into the subject, and to my surprise I found there is some quite substantal evidence that Hebrew might indeed be the original world language. The main source of linguistic evidence is The Word: The Dictionary That Reveals the Hebrew Source of English, by Isaac Mozeson. For a summary of the evidence from various sources, but primarily from Mozeson’s book, see Edenic – The First Language.

Structure of Genesis

In addition to the linguistic arguments, I discovered there are other reasons to believe that Hebrew was the first language, and this lies in the construction of the Book of Genesis, otherwise known as the first of the five books of Moses. However, Moses could not have written it, because it describes events that occurred long before his time. Instead he compiled it from other documents that were available to him. It was commonplace in the ancient world to write a “colophon” at the end of a document, identifying the author, and sometimes the date and place when it was written. Colophons have been found on stone tablets belonging to ancient Babylon, and they are the equivalent of the modern-day title page that appears at the beginning of a book.

The colophons in the Book of Genesis all have a similar form such as “This the book of the generations of Adam”, or “These are the generations of Noah”. The Hebrew word “toledoth” is consistently used, which means “generations”, “origins” or “histories”, and then there is the name of the person who is signing off this section of the history. In some cases it is followed by a list of his descendants, and this has led some commentators to believe that the “toledoth” phrase is an introduction to a genealogical list. However, there is not always a genealogy, and the regular repetition of the “toledoth” phrase indicates that it is genuinely a signing-off phrase and not an introduction. For a discussion of the text, see The First Book of Moses and the ‘Toledoth’ of Genesis, by Damien F. Mackey. He credits P.J. Wiseman as the original author who discovered the toledoth structure in 1936, and since then it has appeared in various commentaries, including The Genesis Record by Henry Morris.

There are nine sections in the Book of Genesis as follows:

The Book of Heaven and Earth (Gen. 1:1 – 2.4), ending with “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens”. This must have been written by God because it covers the days of creation when no man was present.
The Book of Adam (Gen. 2:5 – 5:2), ending with “This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.”.
Note: Gen. 5:2 is probably part of the colophon because of the use of the word “day”, similar to Gen. 2:4.
The Book of Noah (Gen. 5:3 – 6:9a), ending with “These are the generations of Noah”.
The Book of the Sons of Noah (Gen. 6:9b – 10:1a), ending with “Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth”.
The Book of Shem (Gen. 10:1b – 11:10a), ending with “These are the generations of Shem”.
The Book of Terah (Gen. 11:10b-27a), ending with “Now these are the generations of Terah”.
The Book of Isaac and Ishmael (Gen. 11:27b – 25:19a), ending with “And these are the generations of Isaac, Abraham’s son”. It is thought that this large section is mainly from Isaac, but there is a contribution from Ishmael, ending with “Now these are the generations of Ishmael, Abraham’s son, whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah’s handmaid, bare unto Abraham” (Gen. 25:12).
The Book of Jacob and Esau (Gen. 25:19b – 37:2a), ending with “These are the generations of Jacob”. There are two contributions from Esau. The first one ends with “Now these are the generations of Esau, who is Edom” (Gen. 36:1), and the second one ends with “And these are the generations of Esau the father of the Edomites in mount Seir”. (Gen. 36:9).
The Book of the Sons of Jacob (Gen. 37:2b – Exodus 1:4), ending with “Now these are the names of the children of Israel, which came into Egypt; every man and his household came with Jacob. Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan, and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher.”.
In this case the word “toledoth” is not used in Exodus 1:1, but the structure is the same, using the word “shemoth” which means “names”. The names that follow are not a list of descendants, but the names of the brothers themselves, probably assembled together for a signing-off ceremony. Joseph’s name is missing because he had died, as recorded in the last verse of Genesis. In that case, the signing-off ceremony was probably soon after Joseph’s funeral. They were all assembled at Joseph’s house, and they looked at the books that had been written so far, and then they wrote their own book and signed it off. The complete collection of books remained in the royal archive, and would have been available to Moses who was brought up in Pharaoh’s house.
Note: The word “generation” which appears in Exodus 1:6 is not “toledoth”. Instead it is “dor”, which means “circle” or “generation” and is commonly used to imply continuity.

Having established that the Book of Genesis consists of nine separate books, written by different people, the question arises, in what language were all these books written? The name “Hebrew”, referring to both the people and the language of the Israelites, is attributed to their ancestor Heber, the great-grandson of Shem, so it must be a very ancient language. All the books from Terah onwards must have been written in Hebrew, because he was the fifth-generation descendant of Heber. The earlier books must also have been written in Hebrew, for the following reasons:

The language structure is essentially the same throughout the book of Genesis, including the colophons, and there is no reason to believe that the earlier books were translations from something else.
Moses and his scribes were not linguists and there is no reason to believe that they were compiling and translating documents from different languages.
The Hebrew scribes had such reverence for the language of the Torah, that if an error was made while copying a scroll, they would throw the entire scroll away. There were no critical revisions, as might be expected with translations. They behaved entirely as if they were dealing with original text, and not just any old text, but something very precious that had been handed down to them from the beginning of the world.

Conclusion

I have referred to the linguistic arguments of Mozeson, that the original language of the pre-flood world might have been Hebrew, and I have also given the structure of the book of Genesis, on the basis of the well-known “toledoth” phrases. However, I have not yet found any books or web pages suggesting that the structure of Genesis adds weight to the argument, that Hebrew was the language of Eden. Have I discovered something new, or have I simply rediscovered something that was known to our ancestors, whose work is buried somewhere in a mountain of forgotten histories?

Update, July 28, 2003

Since I wrote this article, I found some Jewish people who say that, according to Jewish tradition, Hebrew is the language of Eden, and this is what the Jews have always believed. They call it L’shon HaKodesh which means The Holy Language, and there are many references to the special status of Hebrew in the Jewish literature. To give just one example, the Midrash Rabbah, Genesis XXXI:8 says that “Just as the Torah was given in Hebrew, so was the world created with Hebrew“.

Original @ Annomundi.com

Nemos Notes:

Common Origin to Languages

“Scholar and renowned linguist Charles Berlitz of Berlitz language schools spoke an amazing 32 languages and just like Sir William Jones, his life’s research in comparative linguistics led him to the inescapable conclusion that all the world’s languages must trace back to a single, lost, ancient dialect. Berlitz actually wrote several books about Atlantis and believed the primary language of the human race originated there.”

“In 1786 Sir William Jones, a Supreme Court judge who could speak 30 languages, gave his Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society where he declared that the similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, Celtic and Persian languages could only be explained on the hypothesis that they all shared a common parentage. His contemporary, the German philosopher Hegel, compared the consequences of Jones’ revelation to the discovery of a whole new world and his ground-breaking work on this subject established him as the founder of comparative linguistics. Jones wrote that, “The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.”

~Babylon, Babel & the Assembly of Gods

“The Semitic languages also are all varieties of one form of speech. Though we do not know that primitive language from which the Semitic dialects diverged, yet we know that at one time such language must have existed. . . . We cannot derive Hebrew from Sanskrit, or Sanskrit from Hebrew; but we can well understand how both may have proceeded from one common source. They are both channels supplied from one river, and they carry, though not always on the surface, floating materials of language which challenge comparison, and have already yielded satisfactory results to careful analyzers.” (“Outlines of Philosophy of History,” vol. i., p. 475.)

~Max Müller

Single Root - Common Languages — Single Root – Common Languages

“Magyar language being one of the oldest languages in the world is undeniable and closest in relation to the Sumerian (agglutinative / root words / sentence editing). Professor Samuel Noah Kramer, Assyriologists heavily relied on Hungarian scholars’ help to decode the Sumerian cuneiform. However Kramer never admitted that to the world.

Ida Bobula: Historian, Professor, Sumerologist

The fact that, among the Sumerian words, an exceptionally large number have remained in the Hungarian language, entirely unchanged, throughout the millennia, can only be explained by the extreme conservatism of the Scythian people…”

I have chosen to present here a few convincingly similar Sumerian-Magyar words from her very extensive collection (Sumerian words in capital letters): Bába-BABA (midwife), Csata-SATA (battle), Dalia-DELI (hero), Dézsa-DUSU (vat, tub), Kakas-GAGAZU (rooster), Kapa-KAPA (hoe), Kuruzsol-KURUS(lu) (practise quackery), Pohár-BAHAR (glass, cup), Út-UD (road, way) etc.

Utnapisthim

In Hungarian means

Ut = ut = way

Nap = nap = sun

Ishtim = Isten = God

In connection with the ancient Magyar runic script, Ida Bobula writes about the perception of the Academy:

“Since (according to them) the Scythian relationship does not exist, and since the Hungarian language, according to them, is related to the primitive, inarticulate Lapp language, in ancient times the Magyars “could not have possessed” their own language. The people of Árpád (according to them) consisted of barbarian hordes. If they had admitted that these people had their own writing system, then they would have had to admit that they were civilized people. This is something that this scholarly institution could not allow. Therefore, the scholarly powers decided that the ancient Hungarians did not have their own writing – period! They branded every proof to the contrary as nonsense, or purposeful falsification.” (Ida Bobula, among others, is referring here to the declaration of the Academy of 1903, according to which the runic script does not exist among the Hungarian people.)

In our days we can find information about it but still not the whole truth.

We have the Székely-Hungarian Rovás script.

nm_hngrnrunes.gif

Székely-Hungarian Rovás, which are also known as Hungarian Runes.

Magyars are rooted in the

1.) Carpathian Basin,

2.) Orkhon (Ordos) Valley Mongolia

3.) Subartu (part of Iran, Urartu now days Kurdish).

Our ancestors connected to

Scythians

Parthian Empire (247 BC – 224 AD)

Hun Empire (370 – 469 AD)

Hunor and Magor were, according to our Legend of the Miraculous Stag the ancestors of the Huns and the Magyars

Attila the Hun, the king of many nations his grandfather Balamber and his uncle Ruga lives in many Hungarian legends and in historical chronicles recorded by Priscus.

Our Great Leader Almos’ son Árpád leads the Magyars back to the Carpathian Basin around 869 AD but it is not the first time this is proven by many artifacts.

(Tărtăria tablet)”

~Commenter in Chat

Charts

Ancient Hebrew Comparison Chart – Languages1

Ancient Hebrew Comparison Chart – Languages2

The Dots Connecting

Alexander Braghine in his own search for Atlantis relates how a Basque missionary when speaking in his own language was understood by the Indians of the Peten district in Guatemala.

Dr. James Rendel Harris (1852-1941), the English biblical scholar, claimed that the Mexican province of Tabasco derived its name from an ancient Egyptian word meaning land of the Basques.

An 18th century abbot, Dominique Lahetjuzan (1766-1818?), announced that his studies indicated that Euskara had been spoken in the Garden of Eden!

Professor John Campbell in a 15-page paper entitled The Hittites in America(e) began his dissertation with a claim that the language of the Iroquois and the Basques were closely related. In Peter de Roo’s History of America Before Columbus[890], he recounts the then (1900) commonly held idea that there was a linguistic link between the Basques and various native American tribes, and puts forward the view that the Basques were originally American.

One website is devoted to establishing a link between the Basques, Atlantis and the Algonquins of North America. Bizarrely, at the end of the 19th century, a study of land snails in the Pyrenees led Léopold de Folin to suggest that the ancestors of the Basques came from Atlantis.

A further tale from Braghine records how a person from Georgia in the Caucasus was similarly understood by Basques. This would normally be considered some sort of an urban myth but it should be noted that the linguist Arthur Holmer who is studying(b) the connections between the languages of the Caucasus and Basque believes that the number of similarities are too great to be explained by coincidence alone.

A recent (2019) BBC article has highlighted claims of possible linguistic, toponymic, mythological and even DNA links between Armenians and Basques. It is interesting that Armenia and Georgia are neighbors.