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2 - THE BIBLICAL SCRIPTS

from I - LANGUAGE AND SCRIPT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

David Diringer
Affiliation:
Cambridge University
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Summary

This section is subdivided into four: (1) Early Hebrew, (2) Square Hebrew, (3) Greek and (4) Latin, and three minor sections: (5) Syriac, (6) Coptic, (7) Ethiopic.

EARLY HEBREW

This term is employed in distinction from that of ‘Square Hebrew’ (see pp. 16 f.) which was the parent of the modern Hebrew alphabet, The Early Hebrew alphabet is the original script of nearly the whole of the Old Testament. It was the script of the Hebrew kings and prophets, and was employed by the ancient Hebrews in the pre-exilic period, that is, in the first half of the first millennium B.C., but its use in a limited measure continued into the fifth to the third centuries B.C., and lingered on till much later times. The writing on Jewish coins and the Samaritan alphabet were direct derivatives of the Early Hebrew script.

Accurate knowledge of the Early Hebrew alphabet is an achievement of the last decades. Winckler, Naville, Benzinger, Jeremias, Grimme, and other eminent scholars of the last hundred years argued that cuneiform was the official mode of writing of the ancient Hebrews up to the time of Hezekiah (c. 700 B.C.). Some parts of the Bible were supposed to have been written in cuneiform characters on clay tablets, and certain biblical terms have been interpreted accordingly. Some scholars even denied that alphabetic writing was practised in Palestine before the Persian period. Cowley, for instance, suggested that it was Ezra who, with the assistance of his colleagues, translated the cuneiform documents into Hebrew, and wrote the result down in simple Aramaic characters.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1970

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References

Birnbaum, S., The Hebrew Scripts (London, 1954-7).
Bruce, F. F., The Books and the Parchments. Some Chapters on the Transmission of the Bible (London, 1950; 2nd ed. 1953).
Cohen, M., L'écriture (Paris, 1953).
Cohen, M., La grande invention de l'écriture et son évolution, 3 vols. (Paris, 1958).
Cross, F. M. Jr., The Ancient Library of Qumrân (New York; London, 1958).
Cross, F. M. Jr., ‘The Development of the Jewish Scripts’, The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Essays in honor of William Foxwell Albright, ed. by Wright, G. E. (London, 1961).Google Scholar
Diringer, D., Le iscrizioni antico-ebraiche palestinesi (Firenze, 1934).
Diringer, D., L'alfabeto nella storia della civiltà (Firenze, 1937).
Diringer, D., The Alphabet, a Key to the History of Mankind (London; New York, 1948; 2nd ed. 1949, 1953, etc.; 3rd ed. in 2 vols., London, 1968).
Diringer, D., The Story of the Aleph Beth (London, 1958; New York, 1960).
Diringer, D., Writing (London, 1962).
Driver, G. R., Semitic Writing, From Pictograph to Alphabet (The Schweich Lectures, 1944) (London, 1948; rev. ed. 1954).
Février, J.-G., Histoire de l'écriture (Paris, 1948).
Gelb, I. J., A Study of Writing (London, 1952).
Gilyarevskij, R. S. and Grivnin, V. S., Manual of World Languages and their Scripts (in Russian) (Moscow, 1960).
Heuser, G., Die Kopten (Heidelberg, 1938).
Kahle, P. E., The Cairo Geniza (The Schweich Lectures, 1941) (London, 1947; 2nd ed. Oxford, 1959).
Kenyon, F. G., Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts (London, 1939).
Kenyon, F. G., The Bible and Archaeology (London, 1940).
Moorhouse, A. C., Writing and the Alphabet (London, 1946).
Moorhouse, A. C., The Triumph of the Alphabet, A History of Writing (New York, 1953).
Roberts, B. J., The Old Testament Text and Versions (Cardiff, 1951).
Ullendorff, E., ‘Studies in the Ethiopic Syllabary’, Journal of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, Oxford. XXI (1951).Google Scholar
Ullendorff, E., The Semitic Languages of Ethiopia (London, 1955).
Ullendorff, E., The Ethiopians (London, 1960).
Worrell, W. H., A Short Account of the Copts (Ann Arbor, 1945).
Würthwein, E., Der Text des Alten Testaments (Stuttgart, 1952; 2nd ed. 1963); English transl. of 1st ed. The Text of the Old Testament by Ackroyd, P. R. (Oxford, 1957).Google Scholar

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