The first, and the one we’re going to deal with in this post, is that Hebrew has no vowels. When you study Hebrew though, you quickly realize that it is a very different type of alphabet and very different type of language from ours. So obviously, our alphabet is named after the Hebrew one. It quickly became apparent that if you put together the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph and bet, you get our English word alphabet. Naturally, the first thing I learned was the alphabet. I took a few semesters of Hebrew in college. You can read about their enslavement and eventual freedom from slavery in the book of Exodus. Amazingly, Petrie believed that the markings that he found in the desert were the work of a people known as the Hebrews who were, at the time the writing, enslaved by Pharaoh. 3 Sinai, of course, makes a lot of appearances in the Torah (first five books of the Hebrew Bible). Still, we didn’t know that much about the origin of the alphabet until 1905 when an archeologist name Flinders Petrie discovered several markings in the Sinai desert. Even if you’re a young earth kind of person, that means that people existed a really long time without writing things down. This Proto-Sinaitic alphabet probably emerged somewhere around 1800 BC. That’s the name of the first known alphabet. But for now, let’s start with this question: We’re going to spend a bit of time on this topic and we’ll eventually get around to seeing how this impacts our Bible reading and why it matters. But what if this daily activity, the one we don’t really think about, changes the way that we think about the world? What if, for example, writing from right to left makes you think about things differently than if you wrote from left to right? 2 These next few posts are about that. In other words, we don’t think through every step like we did when we first learned we just pick up a pen and do it. We think about what to write, just not the writing itself. 1 Writing would fall in the habit category. There was once a study released from Duke University that claimed that about 40% of what we do everyday is not based in decision but habit. Eventually, though, like so many other things in life, writing becomes intuitive.
When you start, learning to use a pencil is like learning to eat with chopsticks. Of course, when we first learn to write we think about it all the time. The reason is simple: writing is something that we do, for the most part, without thinking. Ever wonder where the alphabet came from? How about the fact that some people write from left to right while others write from right to left? If I were a bettin’ man, I’d say you probably don’t spend a lot of your time wondering about these things.
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