Rabbinic Hebrew

Mishnaic Hebrew
לשון חז"ל‎ Leshon Chazal
A section of the Mishna
Region	Judea, Syria Palaestina
Era	Developed from Biblical Hebrew in the 1st century CE; continued as Medieval Hebrew as an academic language after dying out as a spoken native language in the 4th century
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Canaanite Mishnaic Hebrew
Early form	Biblical Hebrew
Writing system	Hebrew alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	None

Mishnaic Hebrew is one of the few of the Hebrew dialects found in the Talmud, except for direct quotations from the Hebrew Bible. The dialects can be further sub-divided into Mishnaic Hebrew proper (also called Tannaitic Hebrew, Early Rabbinic Hebrew, or Mishnaic Hebrew I), which was a spoken language, and Amoraic Hebrew (also called Late Rabbinic Hebrew or Mishnaic Hebrew II), which was a literary language only.

The Mishnaic Hebrew language or Early Rabbinic Hebrew language is one of the direct ancient descendants of Biblical Hebrew as preserved by the Jews after the Babylonian captivity, and definitively recorded by Jewish sages in writing the Mishnah and other contemporary documents. It was not used by the Samaritans, who preserved their own dialect, Samaritan Hebrew.

A transitional form of the language occurs in the other works of Tannaitic literature dating from the century beginning with the completion of the Mishnah. These include the halachic Midrashim (Sifra, Sifre, Mechilta etc.) and the expanded collection of Mishnah-related material known as the Tosefta (תוספתא‎). The Talmud contains excerpts from these works, as well as further Tannaitic material not attested elsewhere; the generic term for these passages is Baraitot. The dialect of all these works is very similar to Mishnaic Hebrew.