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Copyright

Yaron Peleg;

Published On

2025-03-07

Page Range

pp. 479–488

Language

  • English

Print Length

10 pages

The Bible and Modern Hebrew

  • Yaron Peleg (author)
Chapter of: Interconnected Traditions: Semitic Languages, Literatures, Cultures—A Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan: Volume 1: Hebrew and the Wider Semitic World(pp. 479–488)
The article explores the role of the Hebrew Bible in shaping modern Hebrew and Jewish culture, tracing its influence from the Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment) to the Zionist movement. During the Haskala, the Bible was used as a literary model to evoke the grandeur of ancient Israel, offering an alternative to Yiddish and promoting Jewish self-worth. Writers like Abraham Mapu used Biblical Hebrew creatively in secular works, such as The Love of Zion, to connect with readers emotionally. With Zionism, the Bible transitioned from a linguistic resource to a cultural and ideological tool, inspiring political and territorial claims and fostering a sense of historical continuity. In the Yishuv, Biblical narratives influenced education, archaeology, and national identity, transforming the Bible into a unifying cultural document. Over time, as Israel modernised, the Bible’s function shifted again, becoming a linguistic standard and a cultural artefact rather than a political or ideological instrument.

Contributors

Yaron Peleg

(author)
Kennedy Leigh Professor of Modern Hebrew Studies at University of Cambridge

Yaron Peleg (PhD, Brandeis University) is Kennedy Leigh Professor of Modern Hebrew Studies in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. His main interests are in Modern Hebrew literary history, Israeli cinema and Israeli culture more generally, primarily the creation of a native Hebrew culture in Palestine/Eretz Israel at the beginning of the twentieth century and its legacy. He is interested in language history and development, literary traditions and modern culture writ large, especially in Israel and the Middle East. He has written about Zionism and Orientalism, about homoeroticism in Modern Hebrew literature, about Hebrew literature and culture in the 1990s, the so-called post-Zionist age, and about various cultural constructs in Israeli cinema, among them gender formation, ethnic identities (Ashkenazi/Mizrahi) and religious identities.