Naftali Herz Imber wrote the poem תקותנו (Tikvatenu, "Our Hope") in 1878, in Iași (Romania) and then in Zikhron Ya'akov, one of the first Jewish settlements in Ottoman Palestine. The original had 9 stanzas. Over time only the first was retained, and tikvatenu (our hope) in line 5 was changed to od lo avda tikvatenu (our hope is not yet lost), echoing the opening of the Polish national anthem (Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła, "Poland has not yet perished"). Imber died penniless in New York in 1909, never paid for his poem.
The tune is a Moldavian-Romanian folk melody known as Carul cu boi ("the ox-cart"), with cousin variants across Central and Eastern Europe (the same melodic family that Smetana used in Vltava / Die Moldau, 1874). Samuel Cohen, a Romanian Jew who immigrated to Rishon LeZion in 1882, set Imber's words to this tune around 1888. It spread quickly among Hovevei Zion settlers, was sung at the Fifth Zionist Congress (1901), and became the de facto Zionist anthem at the Sixth Congress (1903). Officially adopted as the national anthem of the State of Israel in 2004.
תִּקְוָה (tikva), "hope". From the root ק.ו.ה meaning to wait, to stretch a line forward. Same root as קַו (kav), line, cord. Hope as a thread cast across time toward what is not yet here. In Joshua 2:18, Rahab ties a scarlet tikva in her window, a literal cord that is also a sign of waiting. Hope, here, is structural: the line that survives.
הוֹמִיָּה (homiya), "yearns, murmurs". From the root ה.מ.ה, evoking a low continuous sound, a dove cooing, water flowing, a heart that does not stop. The soul doesn't scream toward Zion; it murmurs.
חָפְשִׁי (chofshi), "free". Same root as chofesh (vacation, liberty). To be a free people (am chofshi) is the goal, not powerful, not numerous, just free.
The line ha-tikva bat shenot alpayim ("the hope of two thousand years") is approximate: the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE to the founding of the State in 1948 is closer to 1878 years. The phrase rounds the diaspora to its symbolic millennial weight. בַּת (bat) literally means "daughter of", used here as a Hebrew idiom for age (a person of N years is ben N or bat N). The hope is personified as a daughter, old, patient, still alive.
Hatikvah is not universally beloved in Israel: many Arab Israelis (~20% of the population) find the line nefesh yehudi homiya ("a Jewish soul yearns") exclusionary, since it locates national identity in Jewish religious-ethnic terms rather than civic citizenship. Some Haredi communities object to its secular Zionist framing, preferring traditional liturgical hopes. The melody itself is in a minor key, rare among national anthems, which usually triumph in major. Hatikvah's minor mode carries the diaspora inside it: hope is sung in the same scale as the lament.