Paleo Hebrew

No “half language” has been found because languages were necessarily complete in spoken form long before they began to be written. There would be no written history of partially-developed languages. We know what ancient Hebrew was like because we have examples of it and can read it. That’s why.

Having studied the Paleo Hebrew some time ago, and having some lessons from an Israeli Hebrew Scholar on the matter, I will add this.

From the book of Exodus we read that Moses was brought up in the household of the Pharaoh. He was schooled in all the Egyptian ways, this would include religious, medicinal, mathematics, science and writing. So we must conclude that he could at least read if not write in Egyptian hieroglyphs. But this is not what the bible was written in. Further, we know that he could write, because HaShem tells him to write in a book all the words he spoke to him.

Now we all know that the Torah, the first five books, and how long they are. Even carefully with a quill and ink it would not take forty days to write out the Torah. Now today with all the rules and regulations on writing (making a copy) of the torah scroll it takes a scribe approx a year and a half to do a full torah. But he is copying, and must be sure to not make a mistake.

So even if he was not familiar with this, he could have learned it quickly as it is pictorial and he was familiar with an even more complicated form in the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

It seems that the Levites could also write, they were to write certain things in a book, and one of the commandments involves writing the crime on a piece of paper (this has to do with infidelity if I remember correctly), and Israel itself was commanded to write the commandments on the mezzuzah. There were ketubahs and bills of divorcement which were written documents.

Before they entered the promised land they were to set up stones and write all the commandments upon them.

So writing, in this ancient language must have been well known. Some say it only dates to the 10th century, during King Davids time but it must go further back than that. And the fact that it is still in use today by the Samaritans, believing they have the 'true Torah', is also telling.

Paleo Hebrew is closely related to the Phonetician alphabet but is read differently.

Then there is Proto Sinaitic which was used during the same time as Egyptian hieroglyphics and is considered by some to be the true alphabet. This could be the Alphabet that was passed down with the Hebrew language at Babel. This is seen by some historians as the alphabet that preceded the Phonetician, which many alphabets derived from.

The proto-Sinatic is more pictorial than the Paleo we know of. For instance for the letter aleph, there is a bulls head of no mistake. From this derived the symbol which today looks like our Arabic letter 'A' set on it's side. The Moabite language is also very similar.

These symbols for letters seems to have been used for many a century, even into the common era on some coins.

Even some of the DDS are written in a form of this pictorial paleo Hebrew.

Pictured below is a Hasmonean coin which I photographed at the exhibit from Israel to the US of the Dead Sea Scrolls. On it you can clearly see the Paleo Hebrew.


This coin is Bronze, and minted in Jerusalem It is dated to the time of John Hyrcanus I, 135-105 BCE

John Hyrcanus I was the nephew of Judah Maccabee. Under his rule the first coins were struck, symbols of the newly established sovereign Jewish state ruled by the Hasmonean dynasty.

On the reverse side of this coins is a double cornucopia with a pomegranate atop a priestly scepter between horns.

The side showing reads: "Yehohanan the High Priest and Council of the Jews"

GuardianShua said:

This statement can not be confirmed, but there is a possibility that Enoch through to Abraham may have used cuneiform. When Abraham lived in Babylon cuneiform was in use there.

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Yes, it can be easily confirmed that Abraham was exposed to such a written language, and it wouldn't be far-fetched to believe he could read and write it. Have you ever researched the Ugaritic texts??

pat34lee said:

Question: Is there any proof that paleo-Hebrew was phonetic and not pictographic?

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Hebrew at least at the time of writing the Torah and Psalms was basically phonetic primarily, just like English is. If you read the Psalms phonetically in Hebrew, they make sense. If you do it pictographically, you will be guessing at meanings.

We have found fragments of the Bible written in pre-Ashutire script like they had in the time of David, IIRC. We also have found other written nonBiblical inscriptions from the pre-Ashurite time and thread phonetically.

YONAH:

yonah_mishael said:

It’s not from Kabbalah, but it is truly ridiculous. Words do NOT gain meaning and should NOT be interpreted based on the letters in the word. It’s just a silly thing to do. It’s absolutely backwards.

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Acronyms do.
The TaNaKh is a good example. So is Rambam, the name of Rabbi Maimonides.
YHWH is also a written name.

I heard that the Tanakh has numerous "acrostics".

Also in Jewish tradition, there is an idea that God's name was 12 or 72 letters long.
One explanation is that it was an acronym.
Some scholars like Joel Hoffman, a Jewish Hebrew language professor, see the word YHWH as grammatically aberrational in form for the normal verb "to be". Hoffman proposes that it was made based on the letters, rather than on its phonetics.

BUT I would really like to see more scholarship on this though than just peoples' amateur claims about the pictographic nature of Hebrew words.

English and Hebrew are both in phonetic scripts. I really want to see serious scholarship that supports the belief in a pictographic root of Hebrew vocabulary, because the claim sounds uncertain at best even at face value.

What you are saying is perfectly reasonable:

yonah_mishael said:

The spoken word came about before the written word. When people wanted to represent what they were hearing, they tried to single out the sounds that were produced in their language. They did it by chosing a word that had the sound at the beginning of it and then coming up with a pictograph that represented that word. They then used that initial sound representation to represent the sound in other positions in other words.

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OK, here I think maybe things are going off a bit when you write:

It’s not that anyone ever said, “Well, the sound for B is ‘beit’ (house), so let’s see what words we can create out of thin air that have a connection to ‘house’ and create a language like this.” That’s absolutely backwards. This is not how a language contains or conveys meaning.

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It's reasonable to think that maybe in their time there were concepts with y, the character for arm/hand that they associated in some way with hands/arms, concepts with b that they associated with houses, domestic life, etc.

But how far that kind of thing went is really in question for me. I want to see real research.

I studied ancient Afroasiatic language roots myself for maybe 3-4 months and found that root patterns really do exist, like with the concept of water or sky. N-T "N" words kept coming up as in some way related to water. Predictably then, the inscribers could have chosen a flowing wave for N, and then by default the end result is www signs popping up in lots of water related words. So the theory is not necessarily mumbo jumbo and I can show you my research.

BUT like I said, I want to see real scholarship on these linguistic claims, because Hebrew script is basically phonetic.

I started a thread on this topic here:
Judaism Issue: Has anyone in the past read YHWH's letters acronymically per their pictoral meaning?

Hoshiyya said:

I'm pretty sure we do have scriptures that were written in what is called variously Paleo-Hebrew, Sinaitic, Canaanite and Phoenician - whether they survived to this day or not - I'll try to substantialize that.

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It is represented, I do know that.

The convential wisdom is it it fell out of favor when the script variously called Ashuri, Babylonic and Aramaic replaced it among the returnees from the Babylonian exile.

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Been a while, but off the cuff, Paleo Hebrew is exampled roughly 1100-500BC, coincident with late-ish dating for Moses (roughly 1300-1000BC
I have never heard it argued that Torah could not have been written first in Paleo, and in fact, the absnce of vowels and the continuous bloc format of torah scrolls argue for it. And as such, the Tetragrammaton is also preserved. By 500 BC, it had been replaced by Aramaic lettering, which is still similar to the ancient.

Paleo-Hebrew certainly has nothing to do with Kabbala. I've never heard Kabbalists mention Paleo-Hebrew.

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The value of the meaning and number of each letter of a word is a fairly common practice in Hebrew (and Aramaic) anyway, so I doubt Kabbalists are unfamiliar. It is still done to winnow out meanings by Rabbis today.

It might be noted that modern Hebrew letters retain their Paleo meanings, and numbers, and to a great extent their form. All that appealing to the paleo does, is to promote a conformity from the most ancient of times. And rightly so, I would say.

mrs94 said:

Hi guys! Need some help on something. I posted this here because I wanted to catch more attention.

I was listening to a Pastor earlier rail against the Hebrew Roots movement. One of things he said was that the understanding of Paleohebrew pictographs came from the Kabbalah. Since I am just learning Hebrew and have been looking at some of that, I need help with discernment. I have enjoyed learning what names really mean when the pictograph of the letters has been put together. But, I don't want to get sucked down the path of Kabbalah either.

Please tell me what you think.

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Paleo-Hebrew = a language product from BC (Before Christ) era.
Kabbalah = founded hundred years after destruction of the Temple (>70 AD)

Are they connected to each other?

Ah, Christian baseless slander toward Messianic Judaism.

Lulav said:

From the book of Exodus we read that Moses was brought up in the household of the Pharaoh. He was schooled in all the Egyptian ways, this would include religious, medicinal, mathematics, science and writing. So we must conclude that he could at least read if not write in Egyptian hieroglyphs. But this is not what the bible was written in. Further, we know that he could write, because HaShem tells him to write in a book all the words he spoke to him.

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I think Moses learned Phoenician characters & language and other languages too in his schooling. It has something to do with interkingdom and international affairs and trade.

Ancient people are interconnected just like modern people are, although the communication weren't as fast as our modern communication. Even, the Middle Eastern people could trade with Far Eastern people through Silk Road.

AyeAyeCaptainJack said:

I think Moses learned Phoenician characters & language and other languages too in his schooling. It has something to do with interkingdom and international affairs and trade.

Ancient people are interconnected just like modern people are, although the communication weren't as fast as our modern communication. Even, the Middle Eastern people could trade with Far Eastern people through Silk Road.

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Quite.