The Origins of Hebrew

this is the latest episode of my series excavating the history of the bible brought to you by patheos.com click on the playlist below to watch all previous episodes the hebrew bible is written mostly in hebrew no surprises there but where did the hebrew language come from the earliest evidence we have for ancient israelite language actually comes not from the hebrew bible but from the archaeological record what you're looking at is an inscription on a broken piece of pottery discovered in a storage pit in the ancient israelite town of isbetsarta it might date as early as the 12th century bce here at the bottom of the inscription is a proto-canaanite alphabet although technically written in a canaanite language scholars noticed that we might be looking at a missing link between canaanite and later hebrew the isbetsarta inscription demonstrates the first known example of the letter order that we see in the hebrew alphabet and later the greek alphabet scholars call inscriptions like this abcderies abcderies are objects on which a scribe simply wrote down the entire alphabet probably early in their schooling career just like how we learned the alphabet today the isbet sarta abcderry is particularly messy too which leads some scholars to believe that it was a practice tablet used by students learning how to write this one object raises several topics that we'll explore in this episode first of all this tells us that by the late bronze age and the early iron age an alphabet within the canaanite language family was being used and taught in scribal schools secondly we see evidence of an alphabetic system used in an early ancestor of hebrew that differed from other systems of writing used elsewhere in the ancient near east like cuneiform and hieroglyphics unlike cuneiform which was a system of signs that stood for syllables and entire words this was an alphabet using individual letters a new linguistic invention that changed the way that people wrote and spelled with each symbol representing a sound just like how we write and spell today using the latin alphabet let's start with a basic overview hebrew belongs to a broader family of languages known as the semitic language family today that includes modern hebrew arabic and the ethiopian language ges but the earliest semitic language that we know is called acadian and was spoken and written by the people of mesopotamia such as the neo-assyrians and the neo-babylonians both who had a huge historical impact on ancient israel acadia is part of a branch of semitic languages called east semitic and was written in cuneiform which you can see here on screen it's a wedge-shaped form of writing which was inherited from the sumerians hebrew on the other hand belongs to the northwest semitic branch the earliest language we have from this branch is called eugeridic and was spoken and written by the inhabitants of ugarit on the coast of late bronze age syria other northwest semitic languages included aramaic phoenician moabite and a bunch of lesser canaanite languages that may have been mutually intelligible you can probably tell by all of this that this region the levant was a melting pot of closely related languages people in this region were speaking a bunch of northwest semitic languages as well as languages like acadian and egyptian at the very least scribes knew multiple languages including the lingua franca of the late bronze age acadian and the lingua franca of the iron age aramaic we surmise this based on archaeological evidence such as the amarna letters as we discussed in episodes two and three of the series the amarna letters are a cache of tablets mostly consisting of diplomatic correspondences between canaanite kings and the egyptian pharaoh and most of these letters were written in acadian not canaanite much of our evidence regarding languages in the ancient near east are texts which were produced by professional scribes these scribes would have been trained in scribal schools and served important roles within society based on their education the tradition of professional scribes and scribal schools dates back to the sumerians in ancient mesopotamia and the early periods of egypt where scribes performed an important role in documenting economic transactions recording political issues writing letters and composing literature if the isbetsarta abcderie is indeed a practice tablet we're seeing evidence of some sort of schooling in early israelite villages using a proto-canaanite dialect dating to around the 12th century the isbetsarta inscription is also one of our earliest pieces of evidence for early stage hebrew but most of our written evidence is later dating to the iron age from around 1000 to 587 bc the majority of this evidence appears on broken pottery with writing on them for example in 2008 excavators uncovered a piece of pottery inscribed with five lines of proto-canaanite script at the site of kyrbet keapha a small fortified site located 27 kilometers southwest of jerusalem at the time of publishing this video this is the longest known proto-canaanite inscription it can be confidently dated to the 10th century bc a few centuries after the isbetsarta inscription and roughly the time of king david's rule according to the hebrew bible but much of it remains a mystery some scholars have proposed very different translations but several factors complicate these efforts including the fact that the inscription is heavily damaged and many of the letters have unusual shapes despite these difficulties many scholars propose that this inscription like the izabet sarta abcdery is an example of early stage hebrew but remember both of these inscriptions are technically proto-canaanite scholars are much more comfortable differentiating hebrew as a separate language in later centuries objects from the later periods of the kingdom of israel and the kingdom of judah are inscribed with what scholars sometimes call paleo-hebrew most of these inscriptions are economic documents for example archaeologists discovered a horde of pottery from the northern kingdom's capital of samaria bearing paleo-hebrew inscriptions that record the movement of commodities like olive oil and wine to the capital maybe evidence of taxation or tribute other major paleo-hebrew inscriptions include the siloam tunnel inscription mentioned in an earlier episode it documents the moment that laborers broke through and completed the tunnel that brought the waters of the gihon spring into the city of jerusalem so what does all of this evidence tell us about literacy rates in the ancient israelite kingdoms literacy probably existed on a spectrum so while non-elites may not have been able to read narrative texts they possibly could have read simple economic documents but recent evidence suggests literacy rates may have been higher during the kingdom of judah than previously thought inside a small judahite fort at telerad on the northern edge of the negev desert archaeologists discovered over 100 hebrew inscriptions these inscriptions record military administrative matters like the movement of supplies between military posts in 2020 when researchers ran these inscriptions through a handwriting analysis algorithm they determined that they were written by a minimum of 12 different authors between four to seven of them stationed at tel arad alone since a tiny fort like arad couldn't have supported any more than 20 or 30 soldiers this suggests a surprisingly high rate of literacy within the judahite military but where did the hebrew alphabet come from nowadays when most people think of hebrew they picture the classic boxy style of hebrew letters which is commonly used in modern hebrew today as well as in editions of the hebrew bible however the earliest ancestors of hebrew and other northwest semitic languages did not use this same script this earliest alphabet is known as the proto-sinaitic alphabet because it was discovered on the sinai peninsula at an ancient egyptian mining camp called cerabit al-qarim their archaeologists discovered inscriptions by canaanite laborers working in the mines dating to the middle bronze age somewhere between the 18th and 17th centuries bc the script appears to be an intermediary stage between hieroglyphics and alphabets that we know today with each symbol representing a sound but using pictures instead so let's take a look as we can see in proto-sinaitic each letter is pictographic a picture of an object is used to represent the sound at the beginning of the corresponding word so for example the initial letter in the alphabet aleph was written as an ox head this is based on the word for ox in west semitic languages which begins with that letter so it may just represent the first sound in the word most if not all letters in the hebrew alphabet began in this way eugeritic is also related to proto-sinaitic scholars note that scribes and ugarit apparently adapted the pictographic alphabet into alphabetic cuneiform eugeritic uses 30 cuneiform signs to represent consonants rather than words or syllables this system vastly simplifies literacy requiring a literate person to only memorize a couple dozen signs each with one phonetic meaning instead of memorizing hundreds of signs that could have had a wide range of meanings over time the writing of these letters became more fluid almost like modern day cursive where they only slightly resembled their original forms or looked nothing like them at all this alphabet is not only the ancestor of the hebrew alphabet but also the latin alphabet used in languages like english today going back to the example for the word aleph the later stylized version looks much like a v with a line through it representing the aux's horns over time the letters of the alphabet rotated 180 degrees looking at our modern capital a if you picture it flipped upside down you can picture a rough sketch of an animal's head with horns the proto-cyanatic script then can be considered not only a common ancestor of hebrew but also of other semitic languages such as arabic as well as the common ancestor of phoenician greek latin and modern western languages which use these alphabets today so whenever you write or type using this alphabet remember to thank the peoples of the ancient near east hey everyone that was the latest episode in my series excavating the history of the bible which i'm producing in collaboration with pathios.com head on over and subscribe to the pathos youtube channel to view all past and future episodes of the series the aim of the series is to examine the world of the bible through a non-sectarian and academic lens my methodology is based in archaeology and anthropology i've collaborated with a whole team of field archaeologists and biblical scholars to produce each and every episode topics include the canaanite origins of the israelites the emergence of the philistine cities on the coast of the levant the rise of monotheism and the kingdom of judah so if these topics interest you then head over to pathios's channel the link is in the description below thanks for watching

Channel: ReligionForBreakfast

Views: 432,101

Rating: 4.9021435 out of 5

Keywords: Hebrew, palaeo-Hebrew, Canaanite, Semitic language, Israel, Israelites, Bible, biblical archaeology, archaeologist, Judah, Palestine, Near East, paleo-Hebrew, Izbet Sartah, Ge'ez, Arabic, history of language, Serabit el-Khadim, Protosinaitic, Sinaitic, hieroglyphics, Ugaritic, Ugarit, cuneiform, Akkadian

Id: vKQ5280A2mM

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021

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[u/TomAdams75]

This patheos.com youtube channel includes a number of videos that are blatantly apologetical/theological in the style of American evangelical Christianity. (Eg, “who is Jesus Christ?”).