For those who understand Hebrew, is it very different from the language the Torah was

I am curious because I heard they had less than half as many words as today, so can those that read Hebrew understand the language the Torah was written in? Or does one have to be well versed on the language spoken at that time? Related to this, wasn't the Torah written over a thousand year period or so? Does that mean the Torah has been rewritten many times over? Wouldn't the language change over that time period?

What my ultimate question is, are versions of the Christian Bible such as KJV or NIV roughly equivalent (at least the Old Testiment) to the Torah? And if not, then can one only understand the Bible/Torah without knowing the language it was written in?

Hebrew as spoken in moder day Israel is a kind of artificial language, its a construct, and its often mixed with other languages.

it is based on ancient Hebrew, in which the Torah was written, this language was of course more extensive than modern day Hebrew is now.

Hebrew is a difficult language for some people to understand. When learning the text, the inflections of the written word are varied in such a way that the same word can have multiple meanings.

In answer to the last part, the Old testament was written and translated from at least four different languages in the Books' history... Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Aramaic... but all of them say pretty much the same thing (as long as nobody edits them for content...)

Comparing Biblical Hebrew to conversational/modern Hebrew is like comparing the English of Shakespeare to spoken English.
Many of the words are the same, many words are similar, there are many layers to the meaning of the words in the Torah, and the style is of course formal.
My Frost language is Hebrew, and I certainly have no problem reading the Jewish Bible (or the Psalms, for that matter) and understanding the meaning.
I have read the OT in English as well as in Hebrew, and I must say that there is no comparison.
The Hebrew conveys so much more information than the English!!!
The English test is flat, one-dimensional, whereas the Hebrew text has hundreds of different interpretations, and every letter signifies an additional concept.
This is the reason Orthodox Jews never stop studying!!

in at is correct, but does not go far enough. Ancient Hebrew is not like modern Hebrew as modern English is to Shakespeare. It is *much* farther apart than that. First, ancient Hebrew (and ancient Greek, for that matter) has *no vowels*.

Imagine trying to read even *modern* English without vowels.

Now imagine trying to read Malory without vowels. Malory lived only 600 years ago.

2000+ years ago, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, there *was* no such thing as English.

*That's* what ancient Hebrew is to modern Hebrew.

Jim, http://www.life-after-harry-potter.com

Modern Hebrew and ancient Hebrew are VERY similar. About 90% of the words exist in both versions of the ,engage- where the variations come in is where the Torah uses a word in a different context to the modern version (indicating there has been a shift in the meaning of the word) and the Torah uses grammatical constructs (certain concatenations and abbreviations in particular) that are not used in modern Hebrew.

The vowel points in written Hebrew are a modern innovation and introduced to help people learning the language to read and understand- BUT even most modern Hebrew books aimed at Hebrew first language speakers (or people fluent in Hebrew- particularly religious texts) are published without the vowel points. It is becoming more common to add these into various texts- for example I recently purchased a copy of Midrash Rabbah- originally written in the 6th century, but this version has the vowel points in the main body (though the commentaries are still unvowelised.)

The difficulty comes in when studying the gemorrah which is i aramaic, not hebrew. There the two are similar but NOT identical and knowing hebrew does not mean being able to read and understand the gemorrah easily.

As for the Torah- nope- it was written by Moses and dictated to him by God while he was on Mt SInai- in other words a 40 day period. What you are probably thinking of is the Tanach (Torah, Nevi'im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings))- or what non-Jews call the Old Testament.

Torah and Tanach scrolls found amongst the Nach Hamadi manuscripts (more popularly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls) are either identical or conatin minor variations to the modern texts- and thise variations were often already known to Jews and probably why the people at Nach Hamadi were a seperate sect since the variations are rejected by the Jews as non-authentic.