Biblical Hebrew Forum

["biblical hebrew" <jcr.bhebrew AT gmail.com>]

I'm going to have to agree with Yigal here Isaac. DSS and fragments of LXX
show YHWH written in older script evidencing remnants of the original use of
PH alphabet.


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James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew       -  thesis1: concept driven machine
translation using the Aleppo codex
http://www.lamie.org/lad-sim.doc  -  thesis2: language acquisition simulation

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On 9/8/07, Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il> wrote:
>
> 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
> >
>
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