Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

WRITING

Barrel cylinders commemorating construction of the city wall at Maškan-šapir
by Sin-iddinam of Larsa (1849-1843 b.c.e.) (Elizabeth C. Stone Zimansky)

The three biblical languages are written with two scripts: Hebrew and Aramaic with Square Hebrew script, and Greek with Greek script. The language of each of the ancient versions is written with its own distinctive script: Syriac, Arabic; Ethiopic; Latin, Coptic, Gothic; Armenian, Georgian, Old Church Slavonic. Languages of the ancient Near East that are often consulted by biblical scholars add several additional scripts: Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and numerous varieties of the West Semitic script, including Ugaritic, Old South Arabian, Phoenician, and Aramaic.

Biblical Scripts

Hebrew

Square Hebrew (col. 3 in the table) is itself a form of Aramaic script that had arrived at virtually its modern appearance by the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls (ca. 200 b.c.e.). Like all the West Semitic scripts, it is a consonantary, explicitly denoting only consonant segments (phonemes): the term “abjad” is recommended for this type of script, with “alphabet” reserved for those scripts that explicitly and necessarily denote both consonant and vowel segments. The consonants are recorded one by one, with linear order (right to left) corresponding to the time-sequence in which the sounds are uttered. Every word includes vowels as well as consonants, but the vowels are not written: they emerge from the context or from the reader’s previous familiarity with the text; it was not impossible for readers to mistake the intended sense by choosing an alternative interpretation of the consonantal text. This problem could at times be exacerbated by lack of division between words (by space or a mark), though such scriptio continua was not the rule whenever or wherever abjads were used. Distinctive forms of some letters for the ends of words in Hebrew (and Greek) seem to result from prolongation of pen strokes anticipatory of spacing between words (so while they mark word ends, they were not deliberately introduced for that purpose).

The 22 Hebrew letters denote 23 different consonants (š and ś were similar but distinct sounds when Hebrew spelling was established), including the glides w and y. Sound changes operating in Northwest Semitic languages included diphthongs becoming long vowels: ay˃ē and aw˃ō. The letters y and w were still written in the text (spelling is quite resistant to change through time), so in some circumstances they ended up representing ē and ō, respectively. Over time, they came to be used for ī and ū as well, and at the ends of words h and sometimes ʾ could represent ā. Letters that thus represent vowels are called matres lectionis (“mothers of reading”). Eventually they could be inserted where they were not historically justified (i.e., for vowels that had not earlier been diphthongs); and by the rabbinic stages of Hebrew and Aramaic the script functioned nearly alphabetically, with most vowels, even short ones, indicated by matres lectionis.

By the middle of the 1st millennium c.e., with Hebrew no longer spoken, Jewish scholars called Masoretes recognized the danger that oral transmission of the exact pronunciation of the text of the Bible might be corrupted or interrupted, and over several centuries and in several academies (in Nisibis[?], Mesopotamia, called the Babylonian; southern Palestine; and Tiberias, Galilee — the last emerging as definitive) devised supplemental marks to record the vowels, consonantal nuances, accentuation, parsing, and chanting of the biblical text. Because the form, the very orthography, of the text is itself sacred, the inherited consonantal text is preserved unaltered, with these marks — called pointing (Heb. niqqud) or vocalization (but not matres lectionis) — written above, below, or even within the letters; indeed they are not included in the most holy Torah scrolls, those used during public Scripture reading in the synagogue (where a learnèd scholar, a gabbai, assists lay readers with accurate pronunciation).

Torah scrolls represent the survival of the earliest format of long books: papyrus or leather scrolls. These were inscribed in an ink made of soot (lampblack) mixed with water and a little gum arabic, using a pen cut from a hollow reed. Temporary memoranda could be jotted on a potsherd (in this function called an ostracon) using pen and ink, or on a pair of wooden boards hinged together, the inner faces coated with wax, using a stylus to scratch in the soft, reusable surface. Around the turn of the era, the codex began to come into fashion, a group of nested folded sheets like a modern book; this format came to be associated with Christian writings.

Greek

Manuscripts of the NT, the church fathers, and other Greek literature were written with a full alphabet of 24 letters (col. 9), in uncial forms similar to those now used as capitals (majuscules; the minuscule or lowercase letters developed during medieval times). The linear sequence is left to right for vowels and consonants; atop the letters appear the two breathings — which mark vowel- and r-initial words as beginning with (“rough”) or without (“smooth”) h — as well as the three accents, whose exact interpretation is uncertain. These marks were available from at least the 2nd century b.c.e. but were not used consistently until ca. 800 c.e. Scriptio continua is more characteristic of Greek texts than of West Semitic — in many Classical Greek inscriptions, the letters are equidistant both vertically and horizontally — but is less problematic, because Greek words can end with only a limited set of letters.

Postbiblical Scripts

The historical context of the Square Hebrew and Greek scripts can begin to be appreciated with consideration of other scripts in use in late antiquity. The Syriac (col. 5) and Arabic (col. 6) scripts are the principal survivors (another is Mandaic, col. 4) of a complex of Aramaic abjads that flourished throughout southwestern Asia around the turn of the Common Era, emerging respectively in the Palmyran and Nabatean areas. These Aramaic scripts were usually pen-written (always from right to left) on papyrus, leather, or parchment, or potsherds, rather than incised on hard surfaces — cursive rather than monumental — in utilitarian rather than artistic functions. Their ordinariness and ephemerality, and the convenience of their users, meant that the sometimes conflicting requirements of speed and legibility were the paramount factors in their evolution. A frequent outcome was the connection of adjacent letters within a word — avoidance of time-consuming pen lifts; this meant that some letters could take on rather different appearances according to their position within a word, and some letters could become uncomfortably similar — inhibiting legibility. This difficulty was alleviated by the introduction of dots to distinguish letters whose basic forms had converged — d and r in Syriac (those letters were very similar in almost all Aramaic hands), several sets in Arabic.

These Aramaic scripts inherited the use of matres lectionis, and systematized their use for all long vowels (in Mandaic, almost all vowels), but for reasons similar to those that were to prevail in the Hebrew domain, it became necessary to indicate (optionally) the short vowels as well. Classical Syriac was no longer spoken at least by the time of the Arab Conquest in the early 7th century, so the pronunciation of the biblical text needed to be preserved; well before then, the influx of Persian and Greek words in scientific and theological works had made the recording of vowels desirable. The earliest extant dated Syriac manuscript (411 c.e.) bears vowel pointing (literally; only dots are used) in the system that developed in the eastern portion of Syrian Christianity. Somewhat later, in the western sector, tiny Greek vowel letters came to be added alongside the consonantal text. (A scheme for inserting Greek-like vowel characters directly into the lines of writing was rejected both because it would tamper with the sacred text and because it would render all existing manuscripts unreadable within a generation.) The practices of Syriac scribes were probably known to both Hebrew and Arab scholars when they developed their vocalization techniques.

For Arabic, the problem was the preservation of the text of the Qurʾan in the face of a multiplicity of Arabic dialects. The solution involved symbols not just for the three short vowels of Arabic, but also for various grammatical (morphophonemic) processes that operated in the dialect that became Classical Arabic but perhaps not in that spoken by those who first recorded the consonants of the Qurʾan as it came from the mouth of the Prophet Mohammed. Both consonant dotting and vowel indications occur in the earliest secular papyri, from early in the 1st century of Islam, found in the Cairo Geniza.

The earliest West Semitic script to denote vowels, however, was none of the above — it was the Ethiopic (col. 8). Ethiopic script is usually said to have been imported from south Arabia around or before the turn of the era. A number of Sabean inscriptions have been found in the ancient kingdom of Aksum, which straddled the modern Eritrea-Ethiopia border; a dozen monuments in the Geʿez language and Ethiopic script survive from the mid-4th century c.e. At first the script was very similar to the Sabean (col. 7), save that it now read left to right; but from the midst of the reign of King Ezana, and coinciding with his conversion to Christianity, the inscriptions are fully vocalized. The vocalization is applied not with letters as in Greek or Coptic (most likely the languages of the missionaries involved), nor as in Syriac (not known to have had any vocalization at the time), but by attaching appendages to the consonant letters (the letters sometimes are quite deformed in the process) — except a letter with no appendage represents its consonant plus a, rather than its consonant alone. (Thus each of the 182 Ethiopic letters denotes a consonant-vowel [CV] syllable; this type of script can be called “abugida,” and must be distinguished from a syllabary, where there is no similarity between the characters including a particular consonant or a particular vowel.) Such a pattern is found elsewhere only in the scripts of India (where, some 500 years before, when they are first attested, phonetic science flourished). Were these independent developments? Or is it possible that the missionaries who brought Christianity to Aksum had crossed the Arabian Sea and also brought their own notion of how writing should work?

The language that became the vehicle for Western Christianity, Latin, had been written with an offshoot of the Greek alphabet — mediated through Etruscan — since the 7th century b.c.e. Though the voiced stops b, d, g and the vowel o did not occur in the Etruscan language (and do not appear in Etruscan inscriptions), their letters were preserved in the alphabet (the ancestors of B, D, C, and O), and were used for Latin. Conversely, Etruscan distinguished three varieties of k, written with C before e/i, K before a, and Q before u; this unneeded distinction persists in Latin and the Romance languages today. Since Latin did need to distinguish g from k, G was distinguished from C in the 4th century b.c.e. (I/J and U/V did not become fully independent until modern times.) The capital letters reached their final forms in imperial Rome; the generalization that rustic hands serve pagan works and uncial (Greek-like) and half-uncial (associated with Celtic scribes) serve Christian writings is overly broad but workable. The minuscules are the result of gradual development and were codified in the time of Charlemagne (early 9th century); the italic forms were perfected during the Italian Renaissance. The distinctive German forms used until the mid-20th century represented parallel developments of the North European Renaissance.

It is noteworthy that wherever Western Christianity reached, and Latin remained the liturgical language, local languages came to be written in the roman alphabet, generally with very little modification; but in the realm of Eastern (Orthodox, or Greek-speaking) Christianity, where the vernacular was adopted for sacred use, the local languages received their own scripts, derived from or inspired by the Greek alphabet. (Iranian forms of Aramaic script were carried through Central Asia by both Christian missionaries and secular administrations. Some form of Aramaic was the likely inspiration of the scripts of India; their sophistication may indicate that they were devised after the flowering of the Indian grammatical tradition.)

Coptic Christians added several letters borrowed from Demotic to the Greek alphabet for sounds found in Egyptian but not Greek; in typical fashion, the added letters are not interspersed within the standard order among similar-looking or sounding letters but appear at the end. Coptic (col. 10) has been used since the 4th century c.e. The Gothic alphabet (col. 11), recording the earliest Germanic language to have survived in any quantity, was devised by Bishop Wulfila (also 4th century) to record his Bible translation.

The histories of the two surviving indigenous scripts of the Caucasus, Armenian and Georgian, are intertwined more in legend than perhaps is warranted by history. Both are attributed (in Armenian tradition) to St. Mesrop, whose Armenian alphabet (col. 12) dates to 406/7 c.e.; its related order but dissimilar appearance indicate that its structure but not its form derives from the Greek. Georgian scholars argue that Mesrop was unfamiliar with the Georgian language, and that its alphabet (col. 13) — first attested (in a church in Palestine!) in 430 c.e. — dates from some time after the introduction of Christianity to the country ca. 337. Its adherence to the order of the Greek alphabet, with new letters appended, demonstrates its dependence thereon.

The two scripts of Old Church Slavonic (Old Bulgarian) are also attributed to saints, Constantine (Cyril) and Methodius of the mid-9th century. Glagolitic (col. 14) appears to have developed out of cursive Greek during the 7th-9th centuries and to have been formalized by Cyril during the early 860s; Cyrillic (col. 15) seems to have been modeled on the more dignified Greek uncials by disciples of Cyril’s in the 890s, with the added letters modeled on Glagolitic. (Glagolitic drifted slowly out of use, especially in secular functions, beginning in the 12th century; Cyrillic remains widespread, col. 16.)

Prebiblical Writing

For over 2000 years, the principal, and for more than half that time the only, script used internationally throughout the ancient Near East was Mesopotamian cuneiform. The latest indications are that this script was devised in Uruk, ca. 3200 b.c.e., for Sumerian — i.e., very near in time and space to the earliest examples that have been found by archaeologists. Its earliest uses were economic and scholarly: for keeping records of commodities involved in the temple economy, and for maintaining lists of all sorts of items relevant to the society. At first the script recorded only root words (names of things and actions; the characters at first were recognizable images, but quickly became abstract), but it soon came to notate grammatical affixes as well, and with the flexibility thus provided, it could record connected prose — interpersonal communications, annals, decrees, belles lettres. The subtleties of Sumerian phonology are not yet well understood, but the writing system was subtle enough to be adaptable to unrelated languages with sufficient efficiency to serve for millennia.

Probably the first and the most important such language was the Semitic Akkadian, the decipherment of which opened a universe of materials from Mesopotamian civilization with direct relevance to the Bible. Hence Akkadian cuneiform is characterized here. Its script is a logosyllabary — a syllabary (characters — known as signs — representing syllables of the form CV, V, VC, or CVC) whose signs (logograms) also stand for entire words. The phonetic values of the signs are related to the words the signs originally represented (and because the signs can be read as words in Sumerian or Akkadian, and because signs can represent more than one word in either language, and because there are more sounds in Akkadian than in Sumerian, signs can have quite a few different phonetic and word readings). When words are written entirely with signs used phonetically (and this is the most common way of using the script), reading them is quite straightforward. A number of frequent words are usually written logographically; in these cases, grammatical affixes are added with phonetic signs. If a logogram might be unfamiliar or ambiguous, it may be provided with a semantic determinative sign marking a classification of the intended sense (e.g., divine name, wooden object, place); or portions of the reading of the intended word may be added with phonetic complement signs before and/or after the logogram in question. It must be kept in mind that even though transliterations into the roman alphabet use a varied panoply of italic and roman type, vertical displacement, accents, and numerical indices, the original texts include no indication of whether any particular sign is used as a logogram, a phonogram, or an auxiliary.

The name cuneiform means “wedge-shaped.” It refers to the indentations made in the surface of the small mass of clay that was the usual material for writing. The indentations were made by touching the corner of a reed stylus to the surface; from one to a dozen or so wedges make up each sign. (The wedges could also be imitated by chiseling into a hard surface, or by outlining on a metal ground.) The typical clay object, a tablet, was usually a rectangle with a flat front and a gently convex back and could conveniently be held in one hand, its size depending on the length of the text to be recorded; there were also numerous standard shapes used for particular purposes. Signs were written from left to right employing scriptio continua, but a word is virtually never broken between lines, and often the last sign on a line is spaced over to the right margin. Straight lines could be ruled on a tablet by impressing a taut string, to divide a text into sections (in earlier times, individual entries in a list or lines of a literary composition could be set off in ruled boxes).

Cuneiform script was adapted for numerous languages around Mesopotamia, including Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Urartian, and Canaanite, the last known almost exclusively from the Amarna archives that accidentally preserved the diplomatic correspondence of Akhenaten’s court. The Egyptian language itself, though, was not adapted to cuneiform, even for international purposes.

Egyptian hieroglyphics remains unique among the world’s scripts in denoting only consonants, during its entire history of more than three millennia. It is a logoconsonantary, comprising signs of one, two, or three consonants; logograms; and determinatives (phonetic and semantic) that are used more consistently than those in cuneiform — to such an extent that the semantic determinatives serve dependably as word-end markers. Note that although 24 monoconsonantal signs can be listed, at no time did this set serve as an “alphabet” used to the exclusion of other phonetic signs in composing words. Nor do the signs represent syllables with indeterminate vowels, for one and the same polyconsonantal sign can mark a consonant cluster, the beginning and end of a syllable, or the end of one syllable and the beginning of the next.

Egyptian hieroglyphs, like cuneiform signs, originated as recognizable images, but all through their use they retained their pictorial quality. Nonsymmetrical signs — particularly, those representing people and animals — always face toward the beginning of the writing line. Usually writing is from right to left, but design considerations, such as symmetry on a wall, can call for inscriptions to read left to right. Alongside hieroglyphic, which continued to be used in formal situations until the end of Egyptian civilization, there developed a cursive style of writing the same characters, known as Hieratic, as well as a quicker hand, Demotic, in which many ligatures represent combinations of hieroglyphs; Hieratic can, but Demotic cannot, be transposed directly into hieroglyphs.

It is generally agreed that Egyptian hieroglyphs had some sort of influence on the development of the West Semitic abjad, but in what that influence consisted is difficult to imagine. The earliest inscriptions that have been placed in that lineage, the handful of Proto-Sinaitic texts, comprise characters that bear some resemblance to hieroglyphs; but even if their interpretation as Semitic is correct (and the argument to that effect is circular), the sound values of the letters do not agree with their values in Egyptian. Usually when a script is borrowed, its values as well as its forms are taken over. Moreover, there was no precedent within Egyptian for using nothing but monoconsonantal characters. Perhaps all that can be said is that a Semitic speaker knew just a little bit about how Egyptian was written, but not enough to directly imitate the writing system.

The earliest abjadic texts that clearly belong in the West Semitic line of development are the Proto-Canaanite inscriptions on small objects, none more than a few letters long; when they can be interpreted, they appear to be owners’ names. The first large corpus is the Ugaritic texts from Ras Shamra and environs, dating to the 14th century b.c.e. The script (col. 1) is impressed on clay like cuneiform, but is otherwise not related; the letter shapes can be related to contemporary West Semitic forms. We are fortunate to have several abecedaries demonstrating that the familiar alphabetical order has been in use since near the beginning of segmental writing. Added to the Ugaritic abjad are three additional letters — the last was a sibilant, needed for Hurrian or perhaps Indo-european texts; the others were extra forms of aleph: each of the three aleph letters denotes a different following vowel. Again, these may have been prompted by the need to record foreign texts or names.

Like the Ugaritic, the South Arabian script group (most prominently, Sabean, col. 7) preserves several consonant distinctions that were lost in most Semitic scripts; also now known is the letter order, which is fully independent from the familiar one but similar to the Ethiopic. The reduced inventory of 22 consonants prevailed in the most widespread family of Semitic abjads, the Phoenician (col. 2a); it gave rise to an Old Hebrew/Phoenician group (surviving only in Samaritan, col. 2b) and an Aramaic group, scions of which remain important to this day (the Hebrew language took up the Aramaic script perhaps during the Babylonian Exile and revived the Old Hebrew script, called Paleo-Hebrew, only in sacred and archaizing contexts, such as to write the tetragrammaton in some Dead Sea Scrolls texts).

One offshoot of Phoenician script did prove important. Via a process that remains ill understood and deeply controversial, the Phoenician abjad became the Greek alphabet. A likely scenario is that this was an essentially accidental event (and not a discovery or invention), perhaps ca. 800 b.c.e. A Greek scholar or merchant, admiring a Phoenician’s ability to record transactions, sought to do the same; since Semitic includes various guttural consonants that are not part of Greek, and thus would be difficult for a Greek speaker to perceive, the values of some of the letters could have been interpreted as (what seemed to be) the initial vowels of their names (or of relevant words) — thus the glides y and w could be used as i and u, and the gutturals ʾ, ʿ, and h as a, o, and e, respectively. This need have happened once only, and been communicated around the Greek world fairly rapidly, with various communities supplementing the alphabet in varying ways to account for Greek sounds not found in Phoenician. The Greek alphabet was standardized by Athens in 402 b.c.e., preparing the way for its and its descendants’ use around the world; but it must not be supposed that “the alphabet” is responsible for “literacy” and “civilization” — which predate it by millennia; the sword and the icon, both, mightily prepare the way for the pen.

Bibliography. British Museum, Reading the Past (Berkeley, 1990) (also a series of pamphlets, 1987-1991); P. T. Daniels and W. Bright, eds., The World’s Writing Systems (Oxford, 1996); G. R. Driver, Semitic Writing from Pictograph to Alphabet, rev. ed. (Oxford, 1976); J. Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet, 2nd ed. (Leiden, 1987); S. Segert, “Writing” ISBE 4 (Grand Rapids, 1988): 1136-60.

Peter T. Daniels

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

WRITING

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)