Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>]

Hi,

I was brought up (so to speak, from university on) believing that  
Hebrew was written and read from right to left. Although, I always  
felt that Dr. Davila's explanation of how the letters of the Hebrew  
alphabet evolved from pictures lacked something (does that beth really  
look like a hous?).

Anyway, recently I've been broadening my research a lot and just  
lately I've been looking a lot at the origins of writing throughout  
the world. So, anyway, to get to the point take a quick look at the  
table of characters on this wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Canaanite_alphabet

So, looking at the second column in particular (the 'Phoenician'  
column) and trying to reconcile that with the pictures in the first  
column I noticed the following things:

1) The aleph looks a lot more like an oxes head if you turn it 90  
degrees anti-clockwise

2) The beth looks a lot more like the frontal view of a flat roofed  
ANE house if you turn it 90 degrees anti-clockwise

3) The zen looks a lot more like a set of primitive handcuffs if you  
rotate it 90 degrees anti-clockwise (assuming that people in those  
days had hands on the left and right rather than one on the head and  
one in the tail)

4) The yad looks a lot more like the natural downward sloping position  
of the human arm if you rotate it 90 degrees anti-clockwise

5) The mem looks like water falling down a waterfall if you turn it 90  
degrees anti-clockwise

6) The nun looks a lot more like a snake on the ground if you rotate  
it 90 degrees anti-clockwise


So anyway, my point is a lot of the characters make more sense if you  
rotate them 90 degrees anti-clockwise and this led me to the following  
question:

Was Hebrew written from top to bottom rather than from left to right?

i.e. taking any manuscript at random and turning it 90 degrees  
anti-clockwise could not Hebrew be just as easily be understood as a  
language that was written from top to bottom rather than from right to  
left? Has this been suggested anywhere else before?

James





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