Hope of Israel Ministries (Ecclesia of YEHOVAH):

The Hebraic Origin of the English Language

by Frazer Hughes

The English and kindred people in Britannic lands are not of Teutonic stock; nor is their language rooted there. Considering the language itself, to begin with, and bearing in mind that YEHOVAH God purposed that Israel would lose track of their origin, it is not unreasonable to suggest that that would not have been possible had they retained their original language. Hence we must concede that Hebrew has been replaced by another tongue among the larger of YEHOVAH God’s two families (Jeremiah 33:24). Even so, the results of research have shown that the difference between Hebrew and Saxon are not as great as has been generally supposed.

Many Saxon words have been found rooted in Hebrew, and when we consider that Anglo-Saxon was an unwritten language previous to their occupation of Britain, the process of reducing it to writing would have altered it considerably. Yet the Welsh and kindred ancient tongues in Scotland and Ireland have been clearly identified as dialects of Hebrew. Indeed, not so very long ago it was well enough known that the English language, in its grammatical construction, bore a close resemblance to Hebrew, and it appears to be the only language into which it can be almost literally translated.

In a work entitled Forty-eight Languages Analysed and Compared, the Rev. Jacob Tomlin, M.A., revealed that the early literature of Britain was “largely in the Hebrew, with several modifications,” and that “one fourth of the words of the Saxon tongue bears a close affinity to the Hebrew.” Added to that we have Taliesin, the British Bard of the sixth/seventh century A.D. noted in the Historia Britonum of Nennius. He is reported to have said: “My lore is written in the Hebrew tongue.” The work attributed to him is found in the manuscript Book of Taliesin.

Then we have David Farmer drawing our attention to the record of the Archaeological Journal in the British Museum which claims the language of Britannia’s Seven Nations to be Hebrew. Further to which we cite J. G. Taylor in Objections to Anglo-Israelism, quoting from Canon Lyson’s Our British Ancestors, thus:

The state of the Cotteswold Hills and Wiltshire and Berkshire Downs, in the times of the Britons, may be compared to things in the time of the prophet Hosea. I confess that but for the tradition that assigns our descent from Japheth, I should have been rather inclined to attribute to the British Kelts a Semitic origin, both on account of the relics of worship we find in Britain and on account of the language.

From that same work, Canon Lysons quotes from Roberts’ British History Traced from Egypt and Palestine, saying that the compiler’s “object is to show that the whole foundation of the English language, as we now use it, is Hebrew or Chaldee.” This claim is supported by the fact of Lysons’ compilation of a list of five thousand Hebrew words from our English lexicon; which is reported by Jarrold in his, Our Great Heritage.

On page 17 of the above work by Roberts he states that in the History of Britain, by Aymett Sammes (1676), the author writes of the early settlers of Britain, observing that from their language, which was Hebrew, he would pronounce them Hebrew were it not that Hebrews kept to their own soil. On top of which we have William Tyndale, the first translator of the Hebrew Bible and Greek Testament into English, claiming: “The Greek agree-eth more with the Englishe than the Latyne; and the properties of the Hebrew tongue agree-eth a thousand times more with the Englishe than with the Latyne.”

J. G. Taylor, in his work already cited, quotes Alex Geddes, L.L.D., as saying: “Luckily for an English translator of the Bible, he will not be often under any great necessity of departing much from the arrangement of the Hebrew, especially in the poetical parts of Scripture, where the two idioms are so congenial as to appear almost like twin brothers.”

The idiomatic structure of the two languages, Hebrew and English, is verifiable under the microscope of any reader, simply by arranging any Hebrew text and placing under it its equivalent rendering in English. In no other language than those cognate with our own will it read sense right off. The German and the Latin verb is often a long way separated from the noun. As to the idiomatic structure of language the British and Anglo-Saxon is nearest to the Hebrew. Here are but a few of the Hebrew words in the English language: Amen, cabala, cherub, cider (through French, Latin and Greek), cinnamon, ephod, gehenna (through Greek), Hallelujah, hosanna, Jew, jubilee, leviathan, manna, Messiah, Pharisee, Rabbi, Sabaoth, Sabbath, sack, Satan, seraph, Shibboleth, Talmud.

The Saxons who came via Germany were not themselves of Teutonic origin, and Dr. Lathan in his Ethnology of Europe maintains that they came wholly away from Germany. He says: “We once came there, but came out again in our wanderings to these British Islands.”

In volume ten of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth and tenth editions, Professor Sievers of Jena University has written thus on the German language:

It was as late as the middle of the fifth century that the Jutes, Angles and Saxons began their voyages of conquest to England, where they founded a new people and a new language, leaving their native soil open to Danish invasions. Much earlier the midland tribes (of Germany) had already been slowly pushing on to the West and South, and expelling or subduing and assimilating the Celtic owners of the territories they invaded. What, however, was gained in these parts was counterbalanced by great losses in the North and East. The territories about the lower and middle Elbe, Oder and Vistula, abandoned by the Lombards, the Burgundians, the Goths...were soon filled up by the immigration of numerous tribes of the great Slavonic family....In the sixth century the Frisians still held the extreme north of Holland and Germany. Their midland and eastern neighbours were then called by the new name of Saxons, borrowed from the Saxons who had left the Continent for England.

This is very illuminating. The territories referred to here include the bulk of Prussia; hence the extract shows that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes emigrated to this country as a body, thus confirming the opinion of Lathan and the testimony of the Saxon Chronicle. Also, that the inhabitants of the continental Saxony are not Saxons, nor yet “Germans.”

We may gather, therefore, that so far from Germany being the fountainhead of our race, it was simply the place where our forefathers rested on route to these Britannic Isles, and today is practically destitute of the Anglo-Saxon element save, perhaps, for a random minority influx from the Isles, deluded by false notions of European grandeur. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles plainly state that when the Angles and Saxons came into Britain “None of their kindred remained in old Angleland beyond the sea.”

These Chronicles are a series of six manuscripts, beginning with the early Christian era and ending about 1154. They are of great importance to early English history, linking, as they do, all the kingdoms which had sprung from the same stock, and who had been accustomed to similar institutions. They were put together, as we now have them, in the reign and by the order of King Alfred. In European and Other Race Origins, Bruce Hannay states: “The Teutons are to be distinguished from the Germans proper. The vogue under which Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Goths, etc., are all included, by learned and unlearned alike, under this name Teuton, is to be strongly deprecated, as founded on a hopelessly inaccurate view of actual facts.”

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