Took 'em long enough

 As you can see, I'm making up for the last month or so of no posts.

I heard today a class by Dr. Chagai Misgav, a religious doctor of archeology in the Hebrew University. One of the things he said was that a few years before the class was given (the class is from the year 5773, so we're talking about around 5768), an ostracon - i.e. a piece of ancient pottery with writing on it - was discovered in the Beit Ha'elah Valley. This discovery was considered very dramatic in the world of archeology. Why? Well, until that point, it had been widely accepted that the proto-Hebraic alphabet had evolved from the proto-Canaanite alphabet. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, let me explain:

This is what the proto-Canaanite looks like:

(image taken from here)

and this is what proto-Hebrew looks like:

(image taken from here)

When comparing the various inscriptions and ostracons found, the archeological world managed to create the following theory of development:

(image taken from here)

The columns of interest right now are the first three columns from the left. As you may be able to see, the Canaanite alphabet slowly evolved from complicated, hieroglyphic shapes to simpler ones, forming what would eventually be known as "proto-Hebrew".

At least, that's what most of the world thought, until this ostracon was discovered:

(image taken from here)

The ostracon was dated to circa end of the 11th or beginning of the 10th century BCE, which was a time when the proto-Canaanite alphabet was still in use! That means that these two alphabets were in use at the same time!

And now to the title of this post, and also why I wrote "what most of the world thought". There's one person - that I'm aware of - that theorized all of this a century ago or so: Rabbi Ahron Marcus. In his book Barzilai, on the development of the Hebrew language, he theorized - per the archeological discoveries of his time - that the ancient Hebrews - Ever and his descendants - had developed their own alphabet whose main purpose was to remove idolatrous aspects from the alphabets in use at the time - the proto-Canaanite, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesopotamian cuneiform. All of these alphabets had iconoclastic aspects to them, and the ancient Hebrew, being monotheists, wished to have an alphabet that had none of these paganistic aspects. And so, they formed an alphabet that removed any real meaning from the shapes, images and creatures they were originally based upon, thus forming the proto-Hebrew alphabet.

If we now scroll back up to the first three columns of the comparison chart, we can take a look at the letter ע (ayin), for example. The word "ayin" in Hebrew means "eye", and so we see that it was represented by an actual eye in the proto-Canaanite. However, in the proto-Hebrew, it's just a circle. Not really an eye. Meaningless, really. If it wasn't compared to the proto-Canaanite, most people probably wouldn't see (excuse the pun) the connection between the name of the letter and its symbol, at least not immediately. And that's what how the ancient monotheistic Hebrews wanted it.

Rabbi Marcus believed that different groups used different alphabets parallel to each other. The Canaanites had one alphabet, the Hebrews a second type, the Egyptians a third type, the Babylonians a fourth type and so forth. I'm happy that the academic world finally reached that conclusion as well. 

I'm reminded of a news piece I read last summer, in which scientists proved that one of Plato's scientific theories was correct. I mean, Plato's scientific theories haven't been a thing since Aristotle (who was his direct student, just so you can understand where I'm coming from)!