Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>]

Isaac, are you really saying that you think that the alphabet that we use 
now for Hebrew was the "original" one? Any basic book on ancient 
Western-Semitic paleography will tell you that the alphabet first used by 
the Hebrews was what we today call the "Paleo-Hebrew" or "Phoenician" 
alphabet. Without getting into the debate about who invented it, this was 
the alphabet used by Israelites, Phoenicians, Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites 
and Arameans during the Iron Age (what for Judah was the pre-exilic period), 
with each group slowly developing it's own distinctive style or "font". 
Eventually, the style used by Aramean scribes (now employed by their 
Assyrian, Babylonian and then Persian masters) changed more radically, 
becoming the block letters that we know today. As Jews, both in Babylonia 
and in Judah, became more familiar with Aramaic which had become the common 
language of the whole region, they slowly adopted this common letter-form, 
at first for Aramaic and "secular" documents, eventually for sacred texts as 
well. The Rabbis of the Talmud, looking back at this proccess from several 
hundered years later, claimed that the change had been authorized by Ezra. 
The evidence that we have now shows that it was much more gradual. But in 
any case, the bottom line is that the similarities between letters that are 
part of your theory work in the more recent script, but not in the older 
one. So your claim that these similarities are a part of the basic, most 
ancient structure of the Hebrew language does not hold.


Yigal Levin
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Isaac Fried" <if AT math.bu.edu>
To: "Yigal Levin" <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>
Cc: "b-hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2007 12:08 PM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] chalal - perforate/pierce?/KRH


> Yigal,
>
> You are right. I would not play such games with the Phoenicians; with 
> them I would limit myself to shesh-besh. Do you think it is a mere 
> accident of nature that the square Hebrew letters he and xet are  nearly 
> identical?
>
> Isaac Fried, Boston University