THE ALPHABET OF BIBLICAL HEBREW This page is an introduction to the alphabet of Hebrew Scripture. Hebrew is a Semitic language. The word Semitic comes from the name Shem, named in Genesis (6:10) as the son of Noah , whose descendants lived in the Middle East. Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic are Northwest Semitic languages, and Arabic is Southwest Semitic. All are examples of Semitic languages, which have similar characteristics, such as the presence of guttural letters formed in the pharynx or larynx; a consonantal system with three-letter word roots to connote meaning; and changes in the form or morphology of the word root through the addition of prefixes, infixes, and suffixes to determine the precise sense and function of the word. Hebrew tradition, the Torah itself, as well as Jesus and the New Testament writers name Moses as the divinely inspired author of the Pentateuch (see discussion on Genesis 3:15 ). Archeology has yet to discover the precise time that Moses led his people during the Exodus from Egypt, or the actual script utilized by Moses to write the Torah. The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls found the entire Pentateuch written in the ancient Hebrew alphabet, known as ketav Ivri or Paleo-Hebrew. Phoenicia (now Lebanon) was a peaceful sea-faring nation expert in navigation and trade that developed their alphabet around 1400 BC in an effort to communicate with their diverse trading partners that encircled the Mediterranean Sea. It was the Phoenician alphabet that was widely received throughout the Mediterranean world, as it was only 22 letters based on sound, as opposed to the myriad of symbols in cuneiform and hieroglyphics
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THE ALPHABET OF BIBLICAL HEBREW
This page is an introduction to the alphabet of Hebrew Scripture.
Hebrew is a Semitic language. The word Semitic comes from the name Shem, named in
Genesis (6:10) as the son of Noah , whose descendants lived in the Middle East. Phoenician,
Hebrew, and Aramaic are Northwest Semitic languages, and Arabic is Southwest Semitic.
All are examples of Semitic languages, which have similar characteristics, such as the
presence of guttural letters formed in the pharynx or larynx; a consonantal system with
three-letter word roots to connote meaning; and changes in the form or morphology of the
word root through the addition of prefixes, infixes, and suffixes to determine the precise
sense and function of the word.
Hebrew tradition, the Torah itself, as well as Jesus and the New Testament writers name
Moses as the divinely inspired author of the Pentateuch (see discussion on Genesis 3:15).
Archeology has yet to discover the precise time that Moses led his people during the
Exodus from Egypt, or the actual script utilized by Moses to write the Torah. The discovery
of the Dead Sea scrolls found the entire Pentateuch written in the ancient Hebrew alphabet,
known as ketav Ivri or Paleo-Hebrew.
Phoenicia (now Lebanon) was a peaceful sea-faring nation expert in navigation and trade
that developed their alphabet around 1400 BC in an effort to communicate with their
diverse trading partners that encircled the Mediterranean Sea. It was the Phoenician
alphabet that was widely received throughout the Mediterranean world, as it was only 22
letters based on sound, as opposed to the myriad of symbols in cuneiform and hieroglyphics
prevalent at the time. The ancient Hebrew alphabet (ketav Ivri or Paleo-Hebrew) was nearly
identical to the Phoenician alphabet that follows:
Biblical Hebrew contains 22 letters, as noted in Psalm 119, all of which are consonants.
The alphabet and language remained pure until the Babylonian exile in 587 BC, when
spoken Hebrew came under the influence of other languages, particularly Aramaic. Aramaic
became the prevailing language, or "lingua franca" of the entire Middle East from about 700
BC to 700 AD. Because of the Dispersion of the people of Israel to Babylon and Egypt,
knowledge of pre-exilic texts was dependent on oral tradition. This occasionally gave rise to
an ambiguity of interpretation for a text written purely in consonants.
The Hebrew language adopted the square script alphabet of Imperial Aramaic, known as
ketav Ashuri.
Tradition holds that Ezra adopted the Aramaic square alphabet in place of the ancient
Hebrew alphabet during the post-exilic Restoration of Israel in the fifth century BC. As the
Aramaic alphabet became the Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew papyri and parchments were then
primarily written in Aramaic script. The ancient Hebrew alphabet has persisted to the
present day solely with the Samaritans. The Biblical Hebrew text available to us today is
thus written in the Hebrew language with the adopted Aramaic alphabet.
Jesus and his Apostles spoke Aramaic. However, the Aramaic language was largely
replaced by Arabic with the rise of Islam in the seventh century AD, and is barely spoken
today.
In the East, the Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets evolved into and survived as the alphabet
of Biblical Hebrew:
Please note that the letter ו in Biblical Hebrew was known as waw and pronounced as w, as יהוה Yahweh, and ויקרא
Wayiqra, the original Hebrew name for the Book of Leviticus, whereas in modern Hebrew ו is known as vav and pronounced as v.
Note that the guttural letters א and ע
are generally silent in contemporary pronunciation, and assume the sound of their related
vowel. In fact, the laryngeal א and the pharyngeal ע have been two of the most difficult
letters to pronounce.
Hebrew is written from right to left. There are no capital letters in Hebrew. Letters stand
alone in printing or writing. Observe that five letters, Kaf, Mem, Nun, Peh, and Tsade, have
a final form when the letter occurs at the end of a word. For example, Peh at the beginning
or middle of the word has the form of פ, but at the end of a word appears as ף.
Notice that in the pronunciation column, six letters (aleph, het, tet, ayin, tsade, and shin) do
not convert directly into our alphabet, and have been given symbols for transliteration,
which are sometimes employed in biblical or scholarly works. Please observe in the
following chart the distinctions in the pronunciation and transliteration of the three forms of
the letter shin: unpointed shin (as in original texts or modern unpointed contemporary
script), shin with a dot over the right-hand corner, and shin with a dot over the left-hand
corner.
In addition, three letters, Bet ב, Kaf כ, and Peh פ, vary in pronunciation depending on the
presence of a dot. The point or dot within a letter, as seen in the three letters Bet, Kaf, and
Peh, is known as a dagesh. The functions of a dagesh include: (a) to signal the doubling
effect of a consonant, as in the letter p in יום כפור, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; or
(b) to emphasize pronunciation, as the letter Bet with the dot is hard b, as in ball, whereas
Bet without the dot is soft and becomes v, as in have . Note the pronunciations in the
following chart:
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Numbers one through ten have two forms - masculine and feminine, depending on the noun
to which they refer. Number one אחד may mean one or first, as in Genesis 1:5, the First
Day. Sometime during the Maccabean period (the second century BC), the letters of the
alphabet began to represent numbers, such as the first ten letters of the Hebrew alphabet
began to signify numbers one through ten, as seen in the presentation of the Ten
Commandments.
TIME OF MANUSCRIPT
Two characteristics of ancient Hebrew (before 1000 BC) were the pure use of consonants,
and the use of an epicene personal pronoun (a personal pronoun that does not distinguish for
male and female) - the same word is used for both "he" and "she." This use of an epicene
personal pronoun
הוא
first appears in Genesis 2:11, occurs in Genesis 3:15, and appears 120 times throughout the
Pentateuch of Moses in Hebrew Scripture, but not in the Prophets or Writings.
Beginning in the pre-Exilic period, from the ninth to the sixth centuries BC, the following
three consonants,
yod י ,waw ן ,hey ה
were used at the end of a word to indicate final vowels. Beginning in the post-Exilic period,
waw and yod were also used as vowel indicators within a word.
The recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls were written purely in consonants.
During the ninth and tenth centuries AD, the Masoretes, Jewish scholars in Tiberias,
Galilee, perfected a system of points or nikkud for vowel notation and added it to the
received consonantal text. The vowel points were added to ensure proper interpretation and
reading of Hebrew Scripture, and are known as the Masoretic or Tiberian vowel points. This
point system was added without altering the spacing of the text.
All of these considerations help biblical scholars to date a particular Hebrew text. For
instance, the presence of "pointed text" allows biblical scholars to date manuscripts to at
least the latter part of the first millennium AD.
VOWELS
Vowels in Masoretic Hebrew Scripture are a combination of the historically long vowels,
Hey, Waw, and Yod, and the Masoretic or Tiberian Vowel Points. Vowels are long or short
in quality and quantity. Hey ה, Waw ו, and Yod י became known as "matres lectiones," or
"mothers of reading," as they assisted in reading Scripture. The individual letter used as a
vowel was known as a mater. Waw served as a vowel and was pronounced as long o or u,
whereas Yod as a vowel was pronounced as long e or i. Hey served as a final long a. The
Masoretic vowel points in conjunction with the mater helped to clarify and preserve the
proper pronunciation, so that, for example, waw with a dot over it ו was pronounced long o,
and waw with a dot beside it ו was pronounced long u. The vowel points for Hey and Yod
occur underneath the prior letter.
The Shewa ◌ sign, a colon under the letter, is written in the absence of a distinct vowel
sound, and may be vocal or silent. Shewa under the first letter of a word or syllable, or
following a long vowel, is vocal, and becomes a semi-vowel, and is pronounced as a half of
a short e. Shewa under a letter that closes a syllable is silent. With the guttural letters aleph
,vocal shewa is combined with three vowel signs (Patah, Segol ,ע and ayin ,ח het ,ה hey ,א
and Qamets) to produce three hurried vowels known as the hateph vowels.
The following chart summarizes the Masoretic vowel points. Notice in the following chart
that the majority of vowel points appear under the letter, except for long o when it occurs
over and to the left of the letter.
We recommend the three reference textbooks below for an in-depth study of Biblical
Hebrew.
This multiple form of vowel notation accounts for much of the variation in word formation
in the Masoretic text. For example, Joshua, the son of Nun, in Judges 2:7, is spelled two
different ways in the same sentence! The mater Shureq ו is utilized for the vowel u in the
first spelling, while the short vowel point Qibbuts ◌
is incorporated for the second spelling.
VOCABULARY
Hebrew words with the same root often have related meanings. For example, ילד means to
give birth; ילד is boy; ילדה means girl; ילדים is children or boys; and ילדות means childhood
or youth. Syllables are of two types in Hebrew: open and closed. An open syllable ends in a
vowel, whereas a closed syllable ends in a consonant. Accent is primarily on the last
syllable. The following chart of 40 words is primarily from the Books of Genesis and
Exodus. Nouns in Hebrew are either masculine or feminine. Note the verbs: to create in the
perfect tense representing completed action; to write in the imperfect tense of discourse; and
to call in the waw-consecutive tense of narration. A careful study of the pronunciation of
the Hebrew words should give one an appreciation for the phonetics of Hebrew letters and
vowels. Note that Yeshua, the true name of Jesus, appears throughout the Old Testament,
for it means the Lord saves!
SCRIPTURE READING
The following passage is Genesis 3:15 presented in Masoretic "pointed text." We have
preserved the epicene personal pronoun הוא in consonantal text, as one cannot know
whether the pronoun in the original script referred to "woman" or "seed (offspring)." The
Masoretic text renders this pronoun as masculine חוא . Remember Hebrew is written from
right to left, so the English translation is best understood when read in similar fashion. The
links at the end offer more passages in Hebrew for your study.
References
1 Minto A. Genesis 1-11. Course Lectures and Texts, Franciscan University, Steubenville,
Ohio, 2004.
2 Mansoor M. Biblical Hebrew - Step by Step, Volumes I and ll. Volume One, Baker Book
House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1980, 24th Printing, 2007; Volume Two, Third Edition,
1984, 13th printing, 2002.
3 Ross A. Introducing Biblical Hebrew. Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan,
2001.
4 Lambdin TO. Introduction to Biblical Hebrew. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, New
Jersey, 1971.
5 The Hebrew Bible. Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody,