Hebrew Language
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50 free Hebrew Language trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Hebrew is the rare language that stopped being spoken at home for many centuries and then came back. Today it is heard in cafés, classrooms and pop songs, and a surprising number of its words have slipped quietly into English. This quiz starts with the basics a beginner meets in the first week: how to greet someone, how to be polite, and what familiar festival and place names really mean. It then moves on to the story behind the language, from the Bible to modern slang, with a few harder questions for anyone who wants a challenge. It is written for new learners, Hebrew school students, travellers and the simply curious. No Hebrew reading is needed, because every word is spelled out in English characters, and each answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A Latin reading of the Hebrew word qaran led Michelangelo to carve which biblical figure with horns?
Moses
Moses wears two small horns in the marble made for the tomb of Pope Julius II. The Hebrew verb is now read as 'shone' or 'sent out rays', describing his face as he came down the mountain.
Q 02Shalom, the Hebrew word used for both 'hello' and 'goodbye', literally has which meaning?
Peace
Peace is the core sense of shalom, whose three consonants also give Hebrew its words for 'whole' and 'paid for'. As a greeting it wishes the other person well-being.
Q 03Which Israeli self-defence system, developed by Imi Lichtenfeld, has a Hebrew name meaning 'contact combat'?
Krav Maga
Krav Maga grew out of the street fights of 1930s Bratislava, where the boxer and wrestler Imi Lichtenfeld defended Jewish neighbourhoods. He later developed it for Israel's army.
Q 04Which Hebrew word of praise, sung in churches and synagogues, titled Israel's 1979 Eurovision winner?
Hallelujah
Hallelujah, literally 'praise Yah', won for the group Milk and Honey on home ground, as the contest was held in Jerusalem that year.
Q 05J.R.R. Tolkien based the secret language Khuzdul largely on Hebrew for which people of Middle-earth?
Dwarves
Dwarves keep Khuzdul private and speak the languages of their neighbours in public, a likeness to Jewish history that Tolkien himself pointed out.
Q 06Bethlehem, the town where the Gospels place the birth of Jesus, has a Hebrew name with which meaning?
House of Bread
House of Bread is what the name means to Hebrew speakers, though one scholar traced it back much further, to a temple of the Canaanite god Lakhmu.
Q 07Which Israeli spy agency, formed in 1949, goes by a Hebrew name that simply means 'the Institute'?
Mossad
Mossad is short for the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations. It was set up as the Central Institute for Coordination on the recommendation of David Ben-Gurion.
Q 08Which word for a final, world-ending battle is usually traced to the Hebrew for 'Mount of Megiddo'?
Armageddon
Armageddon appears only once in the New Testament, in the Book of Revelation, as the place where armies gather. The real Megiddo was a city that saw important Israelite battles.
Q 09Mazel tov, the congratulations guests shout at a Jewish wedding, literally means what in Hebrew?
Good fortune
Good fortune is the literal sense: mazel once meant a constellation or zodiac sign, so the phrase began as a remark that the stars were favourable.
Q 10Which Oscar-winning actress, born in Jerusalem, directed the Hebrew-language film A Tale of Love and Darkness?
Natalie Portman
Natalie Portman left Israel at the age of three but kept Hebrew as her first language. Her film adapts the memoir of the Israeli novelist Amos Oz.
Q 11L'chaim, the toast raised over drinks at Jewish celebrations, translates from Hebrew as which phrase?
To life
To life is the meaning, and a tavern number with that English title in the musical Fiddler on the Roof carried the toast far beyond Jewish tables.
Q 12Which everyday courtesy is a Hebrew speaker offering with the word toda, often lengthened to toda raba?
Thank you
Thank you is toda, a noun that also means gratitude. Adding raba, 'much', makes the warmer phrase that works out literally as 'many thanks'.
Q 13Hebrew numbers its weekdays instead of naming them, so which day is Yom Rishon, literally 'first day'?
Sunday
Sunday opens the week in the Hebrew calendar, and the days that follow are simply counted off as second, third and so on rather than named after gods or planets.
Q 21Which collection of Jewish oral law, compiled by Judah ha-Nasi, lends its name to the Hebrew of the early rabbis?
Mishnah
Mishnah was put into its current form by Judah ha-Nasi, who feared that the oral traditions of the Second Temple period would otherwise be forgotten.
Q 22Which English form of God's name arose when readers gave the Hebrew consonants YHWH the sounds of another word?
Jehovah
Jehovah is a hybrid that most scholars trace to scribes who marked the sacred name with a reminder to say 'my Lord' aloud instead. Later readers pronounced the two as one word.
Q 23Mitzvah, a Hebrew word often used in English for any good deed, has which primary, literal meaning?
Commandment
Q 14Which language, believed to be the daily speech of Jesus, replaced Hebrew as the everyday Jewish tongue?
Aramaic
Aramaic pushed Hebrew out of daily speech in Judea, probably in the 3rd century CE, leaving Hebrew mainly a language of prayer, study and writing until its modern revival.
Q 15Hebrew belongs to which language family, making it a relative of Amharic, Maltese and ancient Phoenician?
Semitic
Semitic is a label coined by historians at Göttingen in the 1780s, who took it from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.
Q 16Which sounds does everyday Hebrew writing, from newspapers to street signs, mostly leave the reader to supply?
Vowels
Vowels are shown only by optional dots and dashes, which modern Israeli spelling saves for dictionaries, poetry and books for children or newcomers.
Q 17Which Israeli city was named after the Hebrew title given to Theodor Herzl's utopian novel Altneuland?
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv pairs tel, an ancient mound of buried ruins, with aviv, the season of spring. Translator Nahum Sokolow chose the two words to echo the novel's meaning, 'Old New Land'.
Q 18Hatikvah, Israel's national anthem, adapted from an 1870s poem by Naftali Herz Imber, has a title meaning what?
The Hope
The Hope began as a poem that Imber wrote in the late 1870s while he was the guest of a Jewish scholar in the city of Iași, decades before any Jewish state existed.
Q 19Which Hebrew name for a biblical sea monster did Thomas Hobbes borrow as the title of his 1651 book?
Leviathan
Leviathan gets a full chapter of description in the Book of Job, which is what the philosopher's title alludes to. The word later became a term for any great whale.
Q 20Which lexicographer led the revival of spoken Hebrew and raised its first native speaker of modern times?
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda raised his son Ben-Zion entirely in Hebrew and began the first modern Hebrew dictionary, a project his widow Hemda carried forward for decades after his death.
Commandment is the core meaning, and religious tradition counts 613 of them in Jewish law. A bar or bat mitzvah marks the age at which a young person takes them on.
Q 24Which spring festival, marked by a Seder meal and days without leavened food, is called Pesach in Hebrew?
Passover
Passover is a word first recorded in William Tyndale's English translation of the Bible and later kept by the King James Version. The festival opens on the 15th of the month of Nisan.
Q 25Which Jerusalem prayer site, begun under Herod the Great, do Hebrew speakers usually shorten to the Kotel?
Western Wall
Western Wall is a word-for-word translation of the full Hebrew name, HaKotel HaMa'aravi. Outside Israel the same stones were long known as the Wailing Wall.
Q 26Hanukkah, the eight-night Jewish festival of lights, takes its name from a Hebrew word with which meaning?
Dedication
Dedication refers to the Temple in Jerusalem, which the Maccabees recovered and rededicated after their revolt against the Seleucid Empire in the 2nd century BCE.
Q 27Although five Hebrew characters change shape at the end of a word, the script has never had which feature?
Capital letters
Capital letters do not exist in Hebrew, so a name such as Israel begins no differently from any ordinary noun, and a sentence opens without any special mark of its own.
Q 28In Hebrew, the word for 'you' is ata or at depending on which trait of the person being addressed?
Gender
Gender shapes far more than pronouns in Hebrew: every noun is masculine or feminine, and most verb forms change to match the person doing the action.
Q 29Which patriarch does the fourteenth chapter of Genesis call 'Ha-Ivri', a title translated as 'the Hebrew'?
Abraham
Abraham, still named Abram at that point, gets the label Ha-Ivri. Most scholars link it to a word for 'across', describing migrants who came from beyond the river.
Q 30Despite its title, the New Testament's Epistle to the Hebrews survives in which original language?
Greek
Greek of an unusually polished kind is the language of Hebrews, and that style is one reason most modern scholars reject the old idea that Paul wrote it.