Hebrew language debate the degree to which Hebrew was a spoken vernacular in ancient times following the Babylonian exile, when the predominant international language in the region was Old Aramaic. Hebrew was extinct as a colloquial language by Late Antiquity, but it continued to be used as a literary language and as the liturgical language of Judaism, evolving various dialects of literary Medieval Hebrew, until its revival as a spoken language in the late 19th century. In July 2008 Israeli archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel discovered a ceramic shard at Khirbet Qeiyafa which he claimed may be the earliest Hebrew writing yet discovered, dating
Yemenite Hebrew well as the "ḥaṭaf sǝġūl", are all actually one and the same vowel (in the Babylonian tradition), and it is as though he had written two "shǝwa"s one after the other. Likewise, in the possessive case, “belonging to her companion” ⇒ שֶׁלַּחֲבִרְתָּהּ, the "lamed" in the preposition של is written with the vowel "pataḥ". The Leiden MS. of the Jerusalem Talmud is important in that it preserves some earlier variants to textual readings of that Talmud, such as in Tractate "Pesaḥim" 10:3 (70a), which brings down the old Palestinian-Hebrew word for "charoseth" (the sweet relish eaten at Passover), viz. "dūkeh"