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  • 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>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Alphabet (WAS: chalal)
  • Date: Sat, 8 Sep 2007 20:33:35 -0400

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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