Although Hebrew was the daily speech of the Jewish people for centuries, by the fifth century BCE, the closely related Aramaic joined Hebrew as the spoken language in Judea (where the ancient Jews, "Judeans" (where the word "Jew" comes from) lived) and by the third century BCE Jews of the diaspora (Jewish people outside of their country) were speaking Greek, and soon afterwards Hebrew was no longer used as a first language - for over sixteen centuries being used almost exclusively as a liturgical language (for prayer) until revived as a spoken language by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the Palestine of the late 1880s and eventually becoming the official language of the state of Israel.