Are the origins of the names in Jerusalem Hebrew?

A considerable number of Orientalist studies claim that Jews had a significant influence on the Quranic text and early Islamic teachings, and that Muslims adopted the names of sacred places from Hebrew, which is considered the official language of the Jews in "Israel" today!

This narrative goes further to claim, for example, that Waraqah ibn Nawfal, who played a role in explaining the concept of revelation to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in the early days of the Quran's descent, was nothing but a Jewish scribe. It relied on a narration from Lady Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) in Sahih Bukhari, in which Aisha states: "He used to write in Hebrew." However, this narrative has taken this part of the text out of context, as the full text states: "He was a man who had converted to Christianity during the days of ignorance, and he wrote the Hebrew Bible, writing in Hebrew whatever Allah wished him to write from the Gospel.

It is clear here that reading this text clearly reveals the intention of distortion by some promoters of the "Israeli" narrative. The paper was written by a Christian, and while mentioning Hebrew here, it is, in fact, evidence that Hebrew is not a Jewish language as the "Israeli" media portrays today, but rather a dialect of the ancient Canaanite Arabic dialects known in the Levant, such as Aramaic and others.

It is noteworthy that many of the studies published by the proponents of this school primarily rely on the documents of the " Cairo Genizah " discovered in Egypt, which date back to the period between the 11th and 13th centuries AD; that is, to the time of the Crusades.

This is because these documents were written in Hebrew letters - although they are read in Arabic - which led the figures of the 'Israeli' academic school to claim that the origin of the terms and Islamic texts related to Jerusalem is the Jewish religion by citing the language. Some, like Shlomo Dov Goitein, argue that the term Bayt al-Maqdis,' which refers in the honorable hadith to Al-Aqsa Mosque, is merely a distortion of the Hebrew phrase Bēṯ hamMīqdāš.' According to this understanding, it indicates that the idea of the sacredness of the place originates from Judaism, since Muslims, according to this claim, borrowed from Hebrew even the name of the place and altered it to Bayt al-Maqdis.

In fact, this statement contains many fallacies. As we explained earlier when discussing Waraqah ibn Nawfal, what is referred to as "Hebrew" at that time was not a different language, as some linguists from the Orientalist school attempt to claim, but rather a dialect of the ancient Arabic dialects that dates back to the early Arab Canaanites.

The term " Bayt al-Maqdis " (the Holy House), therefore, does not refer in any way to a Hebrew language; because Hebrew is not an independent language, but rather an alphabetic script that uses ancient Arabic words that still exist. Even the documents of the "Cairo Geniza" confirm this trend, as most of them are written in Hebrew script, but in eloquent Arabic. Anyone who knows the Hebrew letters - which evolved from the Canaanite Arabic known as Phoenician - can read the texts of these documents with great ease.

A simple comparison of the vocabulary of the language now called "Hebrew" in the inscriptions on tombstones and the large monuments in the region of Al-Hijr (Madain Salih), which were carved by the ancient Arabs in this area and the Nabateans as well, illustrates this fact; many of the terms used in Hebrew are the same as those used by the ancient Nabateans and Canaanites.

This indicates that the Canaanite Arabic, which formed the common ground of what we now know as Aramaic, Arabic, and Hebrew, was the linguistic origin of all these dialects that, according to the understanding of the followers of the Orientalist school, transformed into separate languages. Especially since the Qurashi and Sham Arabic differ significantly from the Himyari and Yemeni dialects, which some claim to be the origin of the Arabic known in the era of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and even in our time. This is what Abu Amr Ibn Al-Ala stated when he said: "The language of Himyar and the farthest regions of Yemen is not our tongue, nor is their Arabic our Arabic.

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The term " Bayt al-Maqdis " and even " Bēṯ hamMīqdāš," which are used by Jews today, are pure Arabic words of Canaanite origin, with no connection to modern Hebrew. In fact, when Hebrew became an independent language, it borrowed these expressions from Arabic, which is considered the root from which all dialects in this region originate.

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