Jacob A. answered • 03/23/20
MA and BA in linguistics
I've heard that Hebrew and Edomite were so closely related as to be mutually intelligible.
On a more distant level, Hebrew, being a Semitic language, is related to the other Semitic languages of the Middle East and eastern Africa, such as Aramaic, Arabic, and Amharic. Being related, the languages do have similarities: for example, as a speaker of Arabic, I can often tell the meaning of Hebrew names that I see in the Bible. However, I cannot understand spoken Hebrew when I hear it.
On an even more distant level, the Semitic family of languages are part of an even bigger language family called Afro-Asiatic, which includes other languages of the Near East and North Africa such as ancient Egyptian, Berber, and Somali.
