Divine Language - Abrahamic Traditions

Abrahamic Traditions

In Judaism and Christianity, it is unclear whether the language used by God to address Adam was the language of Adam, which as name-giver, (Genesis 2:19) used it to name all living things, or if it was a different divine language. But since God is portrayed as using speech during creation, and as addressing Adam before Gen 2:19, some authorities assumed that the language of God was different from the language of Paradise invented by Adam, while most medieval Jewish authorities maintained that the Hebrew language was the language of God, which was accepted in Western Europe since at least the 16th century and until the early 20th century.

German philologist Jacob Grimm wrote in 1851 that if God spoke language, indeed any language that involves dental consonants, God must have teeth, and since teeth were created not for speech but for eating, it would follow that he also eats, which, as Frits Staal puts it, "leads to so many other undesirable assumptions that we better abandon the idea altogether".

The sacred language in Islam is Classical Arabic, which is a descendant of the Proto-Semitic language. Arabic, along with Hebrew and Aramaic, is one of the three main Semitic languages. It is considered to be sacred, as, in the Muslim view, it is the language by which Allah revealed the final revealed book, the Koran, to Muhammad, Prophet of Islam, through the angel Jibril.