Reflections on the Development of Hebrew Letters

[kwaw]

Originally posted by Ross G Caldwell
[B,

The question is ... :-)
where is hidden the nose, where is the ear?

[/B]

In the Sefer HaBahir and the Sefer Raziel the ear is attributed to the letter Alef. This of course is derived from kabbalistic exegesis rather than reference to original sources from which the script derives; nonetheless, may reflect remnant of some older tradition. Also of course, the Hebrew word for ear[s] begins with an Alef - AZN.

Kwaw

[Huck]

Originally posted by kwaw
History is not just about 'how it was meant', but also 'what it means', and all the stages of development in between. Those stages may include errors and misundertandings, that does not make them fiction, they remain part of the historical facts that led to their present understanding and meaning.

The mystical tradition surrounding the letters is not a fiction, it is a historical fact. Don't want to get into any arguments or anything, but I find your easy dismissal of the mystical traditions of a people as a 'fiction' offensive. The symbolic associations of the hebrew letters cannot be dismissed as ahistorical, because they do not arise from historical considerations of ancient origins, but out of a form of mystical exegesis, which is itself a part of the historical development.

Kwaw

Hi Kwaw,

my double used words "how it was meant" in my personal article were clearly related to two objects, one the early alphabet and the other the Sepher Yetzirah, they were not discussing, what "history" generally is or how it should be seen.
I think, this is understandable in my sentence, cited by you:

"Your theme is different than mine. I'm interested in the understanding of the early alphabet, "how it was meant" and in the Sepher Yetzirah, also "how it was meant", not in the later fiction about it."

With my words I declare my interests to see and to acknowledge the early alphabet itself and the Sepher Yetzirah independent from their "historical success" and independent from my personal preferences, if I do like this success or not and independent from anybody else personal preferences regarding the theme and the follow up in history.

I think, this is expression of natural fairness against objects in history and documents, to understand them as good as possible with the eyes of their time, when they were innocent and new and not already famous and not generally viewed out of the idealizations builded cause of their successes, which often happened centuries after and were not in the moment of their creation.

Kwaw, this is a methode when researching something, and it is a fair methode. It's not generally dismissive against anything, what happened after.

However, the results of a research naturally can produce the insight, that somebody in the younger past talked nonsense about the object in the older past. Actually this somebody might perceive the result as dismissive against his own theories.

But that's "result of research" and a second pair of shoes. As researcher one has to stand such things. Either you believe you've something to say or not.

[kwaw]

Originally posted by Ross G Caldwell
Come to think of it, that is a good question. What is the earliest list of names of the *letters*? (as opposed to just the letters themselves).
Ross

Well don't know if its the earliest but the acrostic passages in the Septaguint I think is probably the earliest 'biblical' source. In the Codex Vaticanus (siglum B, dating to 4th cent. C.E.) of Psalm 119, the letters names are spelled out in Greek phonetic transliteration.

Kwaw

[Huck]

Originally posted by kwaw
In the Sefer HaBahir and the Sefer Raziel the ear is attributed to the letter Alef. This of course is derived from kabbalistic exegesis rather than reference to original sources from which the script derives; nonetheless, may reflect remnant of some older tradition. Also of course, the Hebrew word for ear[s] begins with an Alef - AZN.

Kwaw

It is somehow a reliable suggestion, that the Poenecian alphabet memory words were taken by Hebrews later, as it is proven, that even Greek did hang up to similar words.
An assumed transmission from other words in Phoenecian context to Hebrew context is more unsecure, although we've for instance the example, that Latin words also bewared their form in different languages with only small changes.

Aleph is the "ox" and as the condition is given, that this indicates in Phoenician context the highest god "El", this is rather sufficient (I think, it's clear that EL or AL ... (-eph) makes no difference - the difference E/A should be only in our language, not in theirs).

[kwaw]

Originally posted by Huck
Aleph is the "ox"

How come Aleph is said to mean 'ox' anyway. In biblical hebrew it means 'to teach, to learn'. Where does the meaning 'ox' come from? The word usually translated from biblical hebrew to english bible as 'ox' is 'bkr' meaning 'cattle'.

????
Kwaw

[Ross G Caldwell]

Originally posted by kwaw
How come Aleph is said to mean 'ox' anyway. In biblical hebrew it means 'to teach, to learn'. Where does the meaning 'ox' come from? The word usually translated from biblical hebrew to english bible as 'ox' is 'bkr' meaning 'cattle'.

????
Kwaw

In Syriac (I don't have my Hebrew dictionaries), "'alap", (ALP) the first letter of the alphabet, is identical to the Pa'el form of the verb YLP, "to learn", hence ""alap", "to teach, inform, train."

It must be the same in Hebrew.

As a simple noun, "ox", it isn't in Syriac either.

Ross

[jmd]

From some of the Kabalistic work I did a number of years ago, it was also my understanding that the 'Ox' part had to do with the trainability of the animal - its domestication.

In another post (I posted a year ago today - Hebrew Letters - Alef/Aleph), I also make mention of the meaning of this letter as teacher or leader.

One of the aspects of importance of Alef and the domesticated Ox is that they both lead a trail. In the case of the Ox, furrows are made in which are sown the seeds to germinate. Writing with letters is somewhat similar, in that each letter, as a seed, is 'planted' in the furrow of the line. That which heads it is Alef.

Of course, this only exegetes (or is a Midrash on) the letter Alef as Ox after the fact, rather than gives grounds as to how this correlation emerged historically.

I suppose that I too have been taken in by what other scholars have in the past written, copied from the opinions of yet other scholars on the matter, and so on down the line.

It does seem, however, that the association between Alef and the Bull or Ox does pictorially make sense, and that perhaps looking at D'Alembert may give a clue - does he not also make that correlation?

Being connected to the torso generally (& specifically the lungs according to the Sefer Yetzirah), and being also the silent letter which precedes sound, a metaphorical link to the Ox makes much sense (though not astrologically).

I also wonder, though had not been able to find it when I searched much earlier, whether there is yet another word in a different language group (Ancient Greek / Ionian ?) which has a word which more properly links Alef-Alpha with the Ox - for then, such letter association would also make latter sense.

Interestingly, by the way, there is some evidence that Alef is consistent with early Hieroglyphics representing an eagle, and here the Air association of the Sefer Yetzirah would make sense.

Of course, I've kind of rambled in this post...

[Ross G Caldwell]

Originally posted by kwaw
Well don't know if its the earliest but the acrostic passages in the Septaguint I think is probably the earliest 'biblical' source. In the Codex Vaticanus (siglum B, dating to 4th cent. C.E.) of Psalm 119, the letters names are spelled out in Greek phonetic transliteration.

Kwaw

Thanks for that reminder. Rahlfs used B/Vaticanus as the basis for his Psalter, so there we have "alf, beth, gimal..." etc. (in Greek letters, of course).

If the Psalter is really the oldest source for the list of names, then it must be the copies of the Psalter found at Qumran that are the oldest.

I think Lamentations in Hebrew spells out the names too, so there is another old Hebrew source, also present at Qumran.

This is all a far cry from 1500 b.c.e.

(I am not calling into the question the weight to be accorded to tradition, and the fact that the Greek names are only explicable on the assumption of a common ancestor to Hebrew and Greek - all I want to know is the sources.)

[firemaiden]

Originally posted by jmd
Interestingly, by the way, there is some evidence that Alef is consistent with early Hieroglyphics representing an eagle, and here the Air association of the Sefer Yetzirah would make sense.

All the web-articles I've seen have referred to it as a vulture, not an eagle.... Hence, the title of my earlier post ""How did we get from Vulture to Ox". The Egyptian Aleph was an Egyptian vulture. It looks very much like our lower case modern "a" in the hieratic script.

I wrote:

... I do not know how beautiful Egyptian Vulture - the hieroglyphic sign for "aleph" ended up in Phoenician as an ox!! One website: Birth of the Alphabet, claims the ox-shaped pictogram is spurious.

Ross later quoted from this same website, Birth of the Alphabet, and cited the very quote I had in mind -- claiming the ox-shaped pictogram is spurious - that there never was an ox-shaped glyph in the pre-Phonecian pictograms. But this website appears to be a lone wolf crying in the wilderness...

It was the ox-head, it seems which helped to identify this proto-canaanite writing at Byblos in the first place: According to website Development of the Alphabet

In 1905, Flinders Petrie, excavating near the turquoise mines in the peninsula of Sinai, came across a number of inscriptions which appeared to be crude copies of Egyptian hieroglyphics but serving to write another language, probably Semitic. At least six of the 30 signs presented appearances corresponding to the meanings of the letter names belonging to the Hebrew alphabet. The bulls head for 'aleph, the zigzag waveform for mem, and the o-shaped eye for 'ayin._

Summarization of research since 1909 on this website suggests that this was an alphabet created specifically for the semitic language, borrowing egyptian glyphs in 90% of the cases, and inventing the rest. Thus, essentially, a new beginning.

Over 90% of the Semitic letter shape were borrowed from hieroglyphics, but only 27% were from Egyptian unliteral glyphs. In almost every case, the associated sound was changed.

The Egyptian vulture represents the glottal stop sound. The word for vulture in the proto-canaanite language must not have begun with the glottal stop, so they must have chosen instead the glyph for a word which in their language, did represent the glottal stop... it seems they borrowed Aua - the bull glyph.

[jmd]

Thankyou firemaiden... just shows that the past couple of weeks I have but skimmed the posts in hastiness as I have been otherwise occupied...

I should have read them all far more closely