...I don't understand you, Karl. Are you suggesting that we cannot prove that there is "no evidence for the 22 letter alphabet until several centuries after your Exodus date"? Of course it should be clear from the context that I was thinking in this case of surviving documents, not your hypothesis about the original alphabet of the Torah. On the latter point, have you considered the evidence I mentioned yesterday about the "Proto-Canaanite" abecedary text from Tel Aphek?
.... As you say, "we have
to play with the hand we're dealt", and the hand we're dealt includes no
evidence for the 22 letter alphabet until several centuries after your
Exodus date.
This can neither be proven nor disproven. The only records we have of
writing in Tanakh indicates that the writing material was perishable,
starting with Torah. With that being the case, we can't look at stone
monuments for the record, rather we have to trust the historical
records. Or not trust them, if that fits your presuppositions
(religious faith, theology).
...I am not talking about changes of font face. I am talking about changes of script, from Arabic to Latin, Latin to Cyrillic, and Cyrillic to Latin. At least one language went through all three of these changes in the 20th century.
I note that these kinds of script changes have been common through
history, and especially over the last century in various countries,
largely for wider political reasons; and while religious establishments
have sometimes initially rejected the script changes they have soon come
to realise the necessity of republishing even the holiest of books in
the newly accepted script.
Here's where we have to distinguish between alphabet and font face.
For example, when I was a kid, I had to learn Fraktur font face
because the hymnals and liturgy were printed in Fraktur while the
secular society had almost totally gone over to standard serif and
non-serif fonts (Yes, I lived in Germany for a while). Today all of
that is printed in standard serif and non-serif fonts, like Times and
Arial. The reason the change could go so smoothly is because only the
font face was changed, the underlying alphabet remained untouched.
I don't think anyone has claimed that they are ancestral to Hebrew, only that they are very close sisters to Hebrew.
If the historical records are correct (and I see no reason to doubt
them), then Torah was written in Hebrew before any of the cognate
languages (e.g. Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic) were written using a 22
letter alphabet (in the case of Ugaritic, before it was written at
all). That makes those languages interesting in that they can
sometimes clarify difficult passages and terms in Tanakh and their
literature provide background material left out of Tanakh, but they
are not ancestral to Hebrew, nor is a study of those languages
necessary for an understanding of Hebrew.
"As a historian, we have to play with the hand we're dealt" means that
we are to deal with hard evidence, not religious belief. ...
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