The ABC and the Hebrew Alef Bet: A Revisionist History

Chazal tell us the world was created with the Alef-Bet. We also know from Chazal that all wisdom comes from the Torah.

I find it intriguing to find, in fact, aspects of other cultures were obviously developed from the Jewish heritage, in spite of cultural erasure by the Goyim.

Ever wonder why the English Alpha-Bet is called so? Why does it sound so much like Alef-Bet, and not just ABC? How come the phonetic order of the ABC is almost identical to the Hebrew Alef-Bet?

Take a look at this chart:

Until the letter נ (Nun), The English letters even keep the same numerical order as the Hebrew letters!

A simple observation will show that aside for the letters ס (Samech) and צ (Tzade) – which are omitted, thereby ruining the numerical-phonetic correlation – the pattern continues until the end of the Alef-Bet:

Did you ever wonder why in the bible almost all the words which should start with a י (Yud) are written with a j and not with a Y? When did this strange development come about?

So, yes, the answer is known. You might have already exclaimed: “Oh, this is silly, it comes from the Roman letters which developed from the Greek Alfa-Bet, of course!”

True.

But if you want to know from where the Greeks got their form of writing, just check the American Heritage Dictionary.

It’s a pretty common book in the house of word-lovers. But for once, don’t look through it to win another game of Scrabble; instead, look at the introductions to the different letters of the ABC.

The dictionary has an insert preceding each letter where the history of the letter is neatly explained, and the letters are all (with no exception) dated to the… “Phoenicians”, who by some mysterious coincidence (?!) held the exact same Alfa-Bet as the Jews…

But for some reason (again…), according to the dictionary, the first ones to “use graphic signs to represent individual speech sounds” were “the Phoenicians and other Semitic peoples” (anything to avoid giving credit where credit is due!).

We borrowed Ashurit from the Goyim, and left Aramaic and Ktav Ivri for them. Indeed, the Phoenicians used a form of Ktav Ivri.

(This might be old news to you.)

But isn’t the shape of the Phoenician Alef-Bet extremely different from our Hebrew Alef Bet?

No. The Gemara mentions there are two forms of writing the Alef-bet: Ktav Ivri and Ktav Ashuri (Ashuri means beautiful).

Old Hebrew scripts are unreadable, because they were written in Ktav Ivri the old way of writing Hebrew script.) One thing I find striking about them is those Ktavim look (to the uneducated eye) more like they were written in old English as opposed to old Hebrew (W, X, Y)…

A quick examination will show that Ktav Ivri is strikingly similar, in the case of most letters, to the Phoenician Alef-Bet form of writing.

The direction, right to left in Hebrew, however, was changed by the Greeks. Rabbi Zamir Cohen explains this was because scribes first used a chisel on clay tablets, employing the stronger, right hand to make a mark. Once parchment and paper came into use, the direction of writing was changed, for ease and comfort.

As a side point, this history also explains the shape of some of the letters in common script, or Ktav (this font can’t be shown on WordPress) which Israelis (and Jews throughout later generations) use:

Ever wonder where the Alef in Ktav (looks like: Ic) came from? I used to wonder about it.

Well, I found my answer in the American Heritage Dictionary, in the introduction to the letter A. It looks like the Phoenician Alef. Same with the funny zig-zag shape standing for Mem in Ktav (looks like: N).

To be continued hopefully…