Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu>]

Yigal,

Absolutly not. It never occurred to me to make this silly claim that  
"the alphabet that we use now for Hebrew was the "original" one". I  
was just making the obvious observation that the interchanging  
letters gimmel, he, xet, kaf, qof, look in our present script, in  
which the Torah is written, nearly identical [many people raise the  
complaint that most Hebrew letters look the same to them, and you  
know how many scribal errors are due this similarity]. If this  
similarity is deliberate or accidental I don't know. I suspect it is  
deliberate. In any event, this has no bearing on my claim on the  
composition of the Hebrew root. I also never asserted "that these  
similarities are a part of the basic, most ancient structure of the  
Hebrew language". Never.
I don't know how old our script is. The common claim that it was  
introduced by Ezra on the first return to Zion, in order to effect a  
clean cut with the Samaritans is plausible, but who knows.
Of course, our square script did not come from nowhere, I see  
similarities between it and that of the ancient Canaanites, but this  
may be an illusion. In any event, even if our square script is a  
direct descendent of the Canaanite script it underwent a good deal of  
premeditated stylizing until reaching us in its present form.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

On Sep 8, 2007, at 5:18 PM, Yigal Levin 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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