Question

Can I use semicolon before the word "because"?

Answer 1

Probably not. See below:

Explanation:

A semi-colon is used to link 2 sentences together that are related but are not directly linked.

For instance, I can write:

Yesterday was a disaster; discovering you are the victim of a home invasion never leads to a good day.

This works because the two sentences are related but not connected by anything other than the semicolon. However, this doesn't:

Yesterday was a disaster; because discovering you are the victim of a home invasion never leads to a good day.

The word because is a linking word and the semicolon isn't appropriate where there is a link. In fact, at least with the example above, it'd read better without any punctuation there:

Yesterday was a disaster because discovering you are the victim of a home invasion never leads to a good day.