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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