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August 27, 2006
So You Think You Know the Order of the Alphabet
Even if you don't know any Hebrew I hope you will be able to follow this. While I present the Hebrew alphabet in Hebrew letters once, I will use a modified Latin alphabet to represent the Hebrew for the important points in this post. And after all, I'll just be writing alphabets. In order to make this work, I will need to use images rather than standard fonts for a couple of things.
Ask just about anyone who has studied Hebrew, ancient or modern, and they will tell that the order of the Hebrew alphabet is,
אבגדהוזחטיכלמנסעפצקרשת
Recognizing that the transliteration goes from left to right while the Hebrew goes from right to left, here is what Hebrew alphabet looks like in transliteration,
Notice that I have highlighted two letters ‛ayin and pe. The ‛ayin doesn't exist in English but is a common consonant in Semitic Languages. The order presented above is the most common order, going back to at least Ugaritic, for West Semitic alphabets including Hebrew. But it is not the only known order of the Hebrew alphabet. For example, an ostracon containing a complete, if flawed, abecedary, was found at 'Izbet Sartah with the two highlighted letters reversed. It is not certain that the language of the ostracon is Hebrew but the letters are very similar to those used in many early Hebrew texts. Now if this was the only case of the reversal of ‛ayin and pe one might just say that this is one of several errors in the 'Izbet Sartah abecedary. But the same "mistake" shows up elsewhere. The abecedaries scratched into a pithos jar from Kuntillet Ajrud and even more striking some acrostic poems in the Hebrew Bible also have these letters reversed. See Lamentations 2:16-17, 3:46-51 and 4:16-17 but you will need to look at them in Hebrew. Acrostic poems begin each segment with a different letter of the alphabet and follow the alphabetical order. In these seeming different contexts separated by at least 450 years, we see that the Hebrew alphabet was sometimes remembered in the following order:
There are several other acrostic poems in the Hebrew Bible. As far as I know, no translation indicates that any of them are acrostic. You need to see how they are structured in Hebrew to see the alphabetical order of the segments of the poems. Even Lamentations 1 is an acrostic poem; it just follows the "normal" alphabet. Or at least it does in the form in which it has come down to us. See Lamentations 1:16-17.
In addition to the three poems in Lamentations, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint (LXX), orders Proverbs 31:25-26 as if the text that was translated had these letters in the same order as the 'Izbet Sartah ostracon and the Kuntillet Ajrud pythos. Some scholars even see this order in Psalms 10:7-8, where it is reasonably clear and Psalms 34:16-17, where a little explaining is required. Although I am convinced that both Psalms 9-10 and Psalms 34 follow the order first seen on the 'Izbet Sartah ostracon, a detailed evaluation of these last two examples is beyond the scope of this post.
So if one accepts that Proverbs 31, Psalms 9-10 and Psalm 34 are also examples of acrostic poems having the pe ‛ayin order than nearly 50% of the acrostic poems in the Hebrew Bible either were once abnormal. Interesting!
Note: there is another, very different, alphabetical order seen on two tablets from the Levant. This is the so-called Old South Arabic order but it may have originated in the west. I wrote about it several months ago.
Update, September 2, 2006
Fixed stupid typo
Posted by DuaneSmith at August 27, 2006 03:35 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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