Semitic languages
The similarity of the Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic languages was accepted by Jewish and Islamic scholars since medieval times. The languages were familiar to Western European scholars due to historical contact with neighbouring Near Eastern countries and through Biblical studies, and a comparative analysis of Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic was published in Latin in 1538 by Guillaume Postel. Almost two centuries later, Hiob Ludolf described the similarities between these three languages and the Ethiopian Semitic languages. However, neither scholar named this grouping as "Semitic".
Edomite language
Edomite was a Canaanite language, very similar to Hebrew, spoken by the Edomites in southwestern Jordan and parts of Israel in the 1st millennium BC. It is known only from a very small corpus. In early times, it seems to have been written with a Phoenician alphabet. Like Moabite, it retained feminine "-t". However, in the 6th century BC, it adopted the Aramaic alphabet. Meanwhile, Aramaic or Arabic features such as "whb" ("gave") and "tgr" ("merchant") entered the language, with "whb" becoming especially common in proper names.