The Hebrew Alphabet Myth

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same, all in a pleasing baritone. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher I don't know how pleasing, but- ... baritone we can provide.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher That's something we can do. Things are good. We've got a fascinating thing to dive into this time.

Dan McClellan Ooh.

Dan Beecher Which is funny-looking squiggles.

Dan McClellan Squiggling.

Dan Beecher I think we're going to get into some good-looking squiggles, and have some fun with that. So, we don't need any further ado. Let's go into Taking Issue. And this week's Taking Issue, we're taking issue with the Hebrew alphabet.

Dan McClellan Well, not the Hebrew alphabet per se, but- Okay ... the way that people have tried to leverage the Hebrew alphabet.

Dan Beecher No, I'm taking issue with the alphabet. It goes the wrong direction.

Dan McClellan It's- Strutting around like it owns the place. Where are your vowels, Hebrew?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Come on. A little big for your britches. So, there are way too many videos that I've come across, and I've responded to many of them, that are saying, "Hey, look at this Hebrew word. Now, it's spelled with these letters, and this letter means this, and this letter means that, and the other letter means the other thing, which mean this word actually means this whole sentence, and it always is pointing to Jesus."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, they're taking origin's advocacy for a Christological layer of meaning a little too far.

Dan Beecher If they were just seeing it as sort of metaphorical or interesting in some way- Well, there is a- ... that would be one thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah, there is a mystical tradition within Judaism that does this.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Are we talking about Kabbalah, or are we talking- Yes.

Dan McClellan Okay. And the kind of precursors to Kabbalah, which make use of the fact that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet ultimately derive from hieroglyphs that at one point in time were associated with syllables and entire words. However, that is a kind of mystical interpretive innovation that postdates the Bible.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Nothing that is in the Bible was trying to do that. And that's what- So let...

Dan Beecher Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

Dan McClellan And I was going to say, that's why I want to talk about where the Hebrew alphabet comes from.

Dan Beecher And- That's what I was going to say.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Yes. Let's go back to that. Let's figure out some origins, because I think that it's super fascinating stuff.

Dan McClellan Absolutely. And the first thing to note, a lot of people don't know this, but when you see Hebrew script today, if you buy a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, the BHS or something like that, if you get some kind of Hebrew text where it's in print, that's actually not the original Hebrew script. That is what's called the Ashurit. That is the Aramaic square script. That was a script that was adopted by speakers of Hebrew after the Babylonian exile, when they spent a couple of generations in Mesopotamia, where they were using the Aramaic script for their Imperial Aramaic. So, the first thing to note is that the traditional Hebrew that we're used to seeing is not the old Hebrew.

Dan Beecher Okay. The old- That is interesting.

Dan McClellan Yeah. A lot of people don't realize this, and this is particularly interesting when it comes to textual criticism, because there are some places where we might have a manuscript where there's two different readings, and it's like, well, one of these letters could be confused for the other, but only in the square script. Meaning that any such confusion would've had to have happened after the Babylonian exile and- Okay ... or vice versa. This is a confusion that only would've happened in the old Hebrew, and some people refer to it as Paleo-Hebrew. In my experience, Paleo-Hebrew is used primarily to refer to, like in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where they kind of intentionally use throwback script.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan So, you've got a bunch of Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts where, for instance, it'll be the regular square script, but then every time there's the divine name, the Tetragrammaton, it's in the old Hebrew. And the- Oh, interesting.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Okay, so I was going to ask, the Dead Sea Scrolls are in the square script. They're in that Aramaic square script.

Dan McClellan The majority of them, the ones that are in Hebrew, the majority are in the Aramaic square script. There are some that are entirely in the old script, and then there are some where they're written in the square script, and then the scribe would actually leave a space, and then the more senior scribe would come in and write the Tetragrammaton in the old Hebrew script.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan Because there are some manuscripts where the person didn't come in and remember to write the thing, and so there's a gap where the divine name should be or something like that.

Dan Beecher But- Oh, that's really interesting. So wait, do we have full texts in ancient Hebrew? In the old Hebrew? In the old Hebrew?

Dan McClellan Yes, and there are a bunch of different ways that we have them. We have some of them inscribed in stone.

Dan Beecher Oh, sure.

Dan McClellan We have some of them inscribed in silver. We don't have any papyrus or other kinds of texts that are written in old Hebrew in the period when old Hebrew was normative.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan We do have some of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts. But when we go back to the old Hebrew, this is much more closely related to Phoenician. In fact, it's basically a borrowing of Phoenician.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And then there are a couple of changes here and there related to how the script works. The script type, it's called an abjad, which basically means that only the consonants are written, the vowels are not written.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And this is why Hebrew looks so unique, where if you do get a Hebrew Bible and you look in it, it's got a bunch of letters, and then you've got dots and dashes below, within, and above the letters. And that is basically a secondarily developed vocalization system. It's called the Tiberian system, and it was something that was developed between the fifth and the ninth or 10th century CE. And so you also have two other versions of that that did not have as many different vowels that they used. But if you go to Israel, or even many places in Palestine today, you'll see Hebrew on signs and stuff, and there won't be any vowels. You just got to know. You just got to know.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And anciently, that's how we came up with some problems, some questions about Molech versus Malek. They didn't write a vowel, and so if there were two words that had all the same consonants, context was the only way you were going to figure that out.

Dan McClellan Exactly. And there are a number of ways that that is still an interpretive issue. So for instance, Genesis 1:1, "Bereshit bara Elohim et ha-shamayim ve'et ha'aretz." Bara is vocalized in our medieval Masoretic Text as if it is a third masculine singular verb, a finite verb. But you could change the vowels to turn it into an infinitive construct without changing any consonants. In fact, that's exactly how it occurs in Genesis 5:1.

Dan Beecher So say those two different things, because not everybody knows all of the grammar words that you just used.

Dan McClellan So in English, an infinitive would be where we add to to the beginning. So I run, that's a finite verb. To run is infinitive or the infinite. And that is where you're referring to the verbal idea. You're not saying, "This is the verbal idea put into action by this subject." So it's not conjugated, would be another way to say it, but it's- Right.

Dan Beecher I'm sorry. So translate the bara- Okay, so basically- ... in the two different ways that you just mentioned.

Dan McClellan So basically, there are arguments for both ways, but basically, if you understand it to be a finite verb, you probably want it to mean, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." If it's an infinitive construct, it has to be, "In the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth," in which case, that would make it a construct phrase, which would make it a temporal clause, which would make the best translation, "When God began to create the heavens and the earth," which would flatly undermine any attempt to try to read creation ex nihilo in there. However, there is also a grammatical way to understand it as a temporal clause, even if it is a finite verb.

Dan Beecher So- Okay.

Dan McClellan So- We're getting a little deep there, but- Vowels are crazy.

Dan Beecher It can change things in very big, important ways.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Another thing to note about the Hebrew alphabet is that it's what's called an acrophonic script, so beginning sound script. And what that means is that the characters descend from an ideographic script. So the characters descend from characters that could be used either to refer to syllables or full words. And so this is what people are talking about when they're saying, "Oh, yeah. The," what do they say? "Hey means reveal, a revelation," or something like that, or behold, or something like that.

Dan Beecher The letter Hey, you're saying.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher The letter Hey.

Dan McClellan Now, it does come from a character that meant that hundreds and hundreds of years before the Hebrew language existed. By the time the Hebrew language existed, it had already been used for centuries to index the sound that begins the word. So in other words, when they're developing the alphabet, see, it used to be you had characters that were entire words or were syllables. Which meant to be able to write stuff, you had to memorize hundreds of characters.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan The innovation of the alphabet was, no, we're just going to reduce it down to individual sounds, starting with consonants, but later, also vowels, which reduced the number of characters you had to learn down to between 22 and 30.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So Hebrew has 22 characters, Greek has 24, Ugaritic has 30. It's a limited number of characters, which meant that a lot more people could learn these characters and hypothetically learn to read. But you got your characters from those earlier ideographic characters. And so aleph is the very first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and it looks kind of like an X. But if you go back to the old Hebrew, it looks like a sideways A- Hmm ... where the horizontal bar extended past both sides.

Dan Beecher Like a sideways capital A in English.

Dan McClellan Correct.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So if you turn it 90 degrees more so that the point is pointing down, you're looking at an ox head. You're looking at a drawing of an ox's head. And so that was a character that referred to an ox. But all we're taking from it is the sound that began the word, which was a glottal stop.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan We've adapted the character, but now instead of representing the whole word, it just represents the sound that began the word. So, that's aleph. Bet descends from a character that referred to a house, and it originally was kind of like a swirl, and then it became kind of a blocky, like a floor plan, and then it turned into what we have in the Hebrew alphabet. But that was the word bayit, and bayit begins with the sound b. And so for an acrophonic alphabet, the bet just represents the sound b. So, there was a time when these characters did mean that. They turned into an acrophonic script between 1800 and 1600 BCE. This is when, in the Sinai, you had Semitic peoples, who might've been miners, they might've been corvée laborers, they might've been enslaved folks. But they began altering Egyptian hieroglyphs to turn them into what we now know as the alphabet. And that then contributed to Proto-Canaanite, which contributed to Phoenician, which contributed to Hebrew.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And Hebrew didn't exist until between 1100 and 1000 BCE.

Dan Beecher So when people- As both a written and a spoken language, or- Yes.

Dan McClellan It was indistinguishable from a generic, broader Canaanite language until somewhere in between 1100 and 1000 BCE.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And this is why when people are like, "Oh, the Hebrew of the Book of Exodus, it reflects the borrowings from Egyptian from the 1400s." Hebrew didn't exist in the 1400s. So, no, it doesn't. Hebrew didn't exist until much later, and then narrative prose in Hebrew didn't exist until even later than that. But by that time, they were not associating the full concepts with these letters.

Dan Beecher So- So, by the time it gets to being Hebrew, you're saying individual letters had no independent symbolic meaning anymore.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher It was just a phoneme. It was just a sound that they were- It was just a sound.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And the aleph isn't even really a sound, it's just a glottal stop. So, it depended on what vowel followed after.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so the Hebrew alphabet, usually you refer to it as the aleph-bet, because that's the origin of the, alphabet comes from Greek. And another interesting thing is a lot of people talk about gematria. You've heard of gematria, right? We've talked about gematria- We've talked about it ...

Dan Beecher in the context of the 666- Yeah ... for example.

Dan McClellan In the periods when the Hebrew Bible was being composed, you didn't use individual letters to represent numerical values. You borrowed some of the hieratic symbols for numbers from Egypt, or you wrote out the word in Hebrew.

Dan Beecher Oh, the word for the number.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So it would be T-W-O instead of- Right ... the number two. So, the character two, yeah.

Dan McClellan We didn't use the Arabic numerals. By the way, the joke that the progressives are out of control, now they're teaching Arabic numerals in the public schools. I love that joke so much. Mainly because there are so many people who don't understand.

Dan Beecher It's a great little gotcha.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, the Hebrew characters did not come to represent numerical values until post-exilic period, around 200 BCE, somewhere around there. And so it's only shortly after that, that you get the rise of gematria. So, when we're talking about the Hebrew Bible, except for maybe the Book of Daniel, or maybe Ecclesiastes, or something like that, they weren't even using individual letters to represent numbers yet.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow.

Dan McClellan So, there's not an awful lot of gematria going on in there. Now, after the Hebrew Bible, you do have these mystical traditions that are developing in third, fourth, fifth centuries CE within Judaism, where people are starting to try to find more significance. And they were doing the same thing that people are doing today when they try to say, "Hey, check it out. If you look at the names in Genesis 5 and the meanings of the names, it creates a sentence that talks about the Christian gospel." They're doing the same thing. They're trying to find- Right ... more significance, deeper significance, richer significance in the text, and they're going about it by trying to understand how the authors could have been inscribing special hidden significance in the characters using gematria and numbers, or using these significations. And so later on, what's one? The Shema. Shema Israel.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one." There's a very early kabbalistic reading that says Shema is shin, mem, ayin. Well, shin and mem, put them together, that means name. Ayin has a numerical value of 70. So, what is the Shema Israel? The 70 names of God.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So, that kind of thing is going on in late antique Judaism and particularly into medieval Judaism. But people today who are aware that that was going on, but then they try to read it back into the Hebrew Bible, there's not a historical case to make for that kind of thing.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It's so funny to me because I don't see any reason to say if you find that interesting, or if you find that fun, Dan Brown it up.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Or dive back in and let it be instructive to your own understanding or to your own theology. But be honest about what it is.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Just be honest that, okay, the authors didn't intend this. I guess you could make the claim that God programmed it in when the authors weren't intending it somehow.

Dan McClellan That's part of the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. Which was, I think exactly what they said was something along the lines of, "We deny that the authors were fully aware of all the significance of what they wrote," or something like that.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan But basically saying, yeah, that, "We reserve the right to read anything into here that we want, even if it's entirely anachronistic- ... because we think it's inspired, and so God sees all."

Dan Beecher So. Yeah, I guess you could make that claim. But it's just so much nicer to just say, "Okay, this is interesting to me." It's not unlike astrology. I have no problem with it if it's just instructive to you.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But if you start to say, "No, this is fact." Do you know what I mean?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher "No, this being here and that being there, this letter means this, and this letter means that, and that's the fact, and it proves X, Y, or Z."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's when you have a problem. That's when you're in bad waters.

Dan McClellan Yeah. This is a frustration of mine. A lot of people will accuse me of spending all my time on social media attacking people's beliefs. And every time I want to be like, "I don't care about your beliefs. If you want to believe any of this stuff, blast off." It is when you go onto social media and tell other people that this is true- Right ... that you have stumbled onto or stumbled into my territory. You're in my house now, and- ... when you're telling people that this is true... Because if you want to say, "This is something that I found meaning to this, and I'm aware that this is not how it was actually worked anciently, but you can just think about it this way, and isn't this cool?" I would never make a response video to that and tell those people to take a hike. But it's when people say that this is the way it really is, and particularly when they're doing it when it's harmful.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Beliefs that are harmful, yes. I won't seek people out, but I will criticize beliefs that are harmful. But believing that the letter Alef represents God, until you go make a video on social media declaring that to be fact, I could not care less.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Believe what you want to believe. Don't be a dick.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan That's still the official position of Data Over Dogma podcast.

Dan Beecher That is the official position of our podcast.

Dan McClellan Absolutely.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Don't be a jerk, and also know when you're just making something up that's useful to you.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher If it's useful to you, great. If it's mystical to you, great. Present it that way. You could even go on social media and be like, "Here's something that I heard. It may or may not be true, but it's interesting to me." You could do that. Dan won't come for you for that.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Just don't get on social media and say, "God's rainbow has seven colors, and the pride flag has six." "They took out indigo, and that's Jesus."

Dan Beecher And that's why gay people are bad. Yeah, exactly.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah. That's satanic. Satan took out indigo, and that's Jesus. When you do that, you're inviting criticism.

Dan Beecher And then Dan has to make a video that brings in Isaac Newton and music- ... and none of it makes any sense, so just don't.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Just don't.

Dan McClellan Don't make me talk about music.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, I think that's fascinating. That was a lot of fun. If you thought it was a lot of fun, hey, go ahead and share it, like, comment, subscribe if you're on the YouTubes. If you're just listening at home or if you're on the YouTubes, please feel free to go to be a patron of our show over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Those are our favorite of all of you. So, if you want to be one of our favorites and get in our great graces, becoming a patron is a great way to do it. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show and to JJ Neward for being our producer, and we'll talk to you again next week.

Dan McClellan Bye, everybody.