A Very Brief History of Old Hebrew Script

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Many of you probably have an idea of what the Hebrew alphabet looks like. Perhaps you know Hebrew. Perhaps you have visited Israel and seen signposts with modern Hebrew letters. Perhaps you even have seen manuscripts or editions of the Torah. This alphabet is called “square script,” because most letters would fit into a square. It is the main script that people used to write books in Hebrew for more than two thousand years, with many calligraphic variations and styles. But it is not the script that the inhabitants of Judah and Israel used during the monarchic period, which stretched from the tenth to the early sixth centuries B.C.E. Neither the scribes of King Hezekiah or Josiah nor their contemporaries who wrote some of the biblical books would have been able to read this alphabet. They used a different script: Old Hebrew (also called Paleo-Hebrew).

But why was Old Hebrew abandoned and when? What, in fact, is the story of this little-known writing system?

Let us first look at some inscriptions from the last centuries of the monarchy in Judah (eighth to early sixth centuries B.C.E.). This was the heyday of the Old Hebrew script.

Perhaps the most beautiful text ever found in Old Hebrew is the Siloam Tunnel Inscription. The Siloam Tunnel, in the City of David, was built in the late eighth century to divert the water from the Gihon Spring to a point inside the city of Jerusalem with easy access for the Mishneh, the new quarter occupying the Western Hill. Many historians ascribe this work to King Hezekiah (see 2 Kings 20:20), although some prefer to attribute it to his son, Manasseh. In 1880, an inscription was found in the tunnel, a few feet before its southern end. Here is an excerpt:

While [the hewers were swinging the] axe, each towards his companion, and while there were still three cubits to he[w, there was hea]rd the voice of a man ca[ll]ing to his companion because there was a fissure(?) in the rock, on the right and on the le[f]t. And on the day of its breakthrough, the hewers struck each man toward his companion, axe against [a]xe, and the waters flowed from the outlet to the pool.¹

In a word, this inscription commemorates the day when the two teams hewing the tunnel from both its extremities met. The inscription was carved with impressive mastery. What contributes perhaps most to the beauty of its script is the presence of elegant curved lines extending both above and below some letters, which is typical of Old Hebrew. In addition, the engraver imitated 049the thick and thin strokes made by a reed pen. Because scholars have charted the development of this script through time, they suggest a paleographic dating for this document: It was carved c. 700 B.C.E., with a confidence interval of a few decades.

The most common kinds of inscriptions that archaeologists unearth in the southern Levant are less impressive; they are brief texts from daily life, incised or written with ink on jars or potsherds (called ostraca). The vast majority of ostraca contain lists of people or commodities. Others bear messages. A number of such letters between soldiers have surfaced in Lachish, an important fortified city of Judah. On such daily life documents, the scribes use a cursive version of the letterforms: They write quickly, the handwriting is sloping, and the angle of the letters is generally more acute. In spite of their casual nature, these texts sometimes yield important information for historians. Lachish Letter #3 is a good example. It was sent by a junior officer to the commander of Lachish not long before the Babylonians took Jerusalem in the early sixth century B.C.E. It reads:

Your servant Hoshayahu sent to inform my lord, Yaush: May YHWH cause my lord to hear tidings of peace and tidings of good. And now, open the ear of your servant concerning the letter which you sent to your servant last evening because the heart of your servant is ill since your sending it to your servant. And inasmuch as my lord said: “Don’t you know how to read a letter?” As YHWH lives, if anyone has ever tried to read me a letter! And as for every letter that comes to me, I read it. And furthermore, I will grant it as nothing.

And to your servant it has been reported, saying: “The commander of the army, Conyahu son of Elnathan, has gone down to go to Egypt and he sent to commandeer Hodavyahu son of Ahiyahu and his men from here.”

And as for the letter of Tobyahu, the servant of the king, which came to Shallum son of Yada, from the prophet, saying: “Be on your guard!” your ser[va]nt is sending it to my lord.

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Several aspects of this text are worth noting: First, Hoshayahu uses an oath formula (“As YHWH lives”) known from biblical texts (e.g., 1 Samuel 19:6). Second, according to the translation above—which is debated ²—the junior officer protests that he is able to read. Indeed, only a limited section of the population could read, but, apparently, literacy was higher in the army. Third, the commander of the army went to Egypt, which may be a trace of attempts by Judah to seek help from the Egyptians (see Jeremiah 37:5-12). Fourth, the text mentions a prophet whose message is taken seriously by the army. All in all, this fascinating ostracon gives a glimpse of the concrete situation in a Judean fort not long before the Babylonian invasion.

But what about papyrus, the medium used for long or literary texts? Only one sheet of papyrus from the monarchic period has ever been found, coming from a cave in the Wadi Murabba‘at.^a It is a palimpsest (reused sheet of papyrus): The original message was later scratched away to write down a list.

Unfortunately, papyrus is a perishable material that is preserved only in special conditions. Despite this lack of papyri, we do have some evidence of them—one that itself provides examples of writing. Some papyri were sealed: 051After being rolled and tied with a string, a little ball of clay was affixed to it and impressed with a seal to create a bulla. From the eighth century onward, many seals contained the name of their owners. The script tends to be a bit more formal than on ostraca. Archaeologists do find many seals and bullae during excavations. For instance, in 2009, a bulla of King Hezekiah was found in Jerusalem.^b Its inscription reads: “(belonging) to Hezekiah (son of) Ahaz king of Judah.”

One of the lessons we learn from examining such a diversity of inscriptions is that Old Hebrew scribes used the same script for all categories of texts, whether monumental inscriptions, everyday messages, or signatures. The handwriting may be more or less formal or cursive, but there is basic unity. This situation cannot be taken for granted: In some regions, scribes had recourse to different scripts or to very different forms of the same script, depending on the situation. Thus in Egypt, the difference between hieroglyphs and hieratic scripts is clear. Not so in Israel and Judah. The Old Hebrew alphabet is at once beautiful enough to make it suited to monumental inscriptions—and functional enough to make it practical for fast writing.

In fact, another remarkable feature of Old Hebrew inscriptions is the existence of conventions followed by many scribes in the execution of letterforms and notation of orthographic features. This points to a standardized scribal curriculum.³ This may have ultimately resulted from an adaptation of the robust curriculum followed by scribes learning the cuneiform script (used to write on clay tablets).⁴ All in all, the Old Hebrew inscriptions constitute a fairly homogeneous corpus written with a relatively conservative script.

Old Hebrew inscriptions seem to have been written in a variety of Hebrew remarkably similar to what Hebraists describe as “Standard Biblical Hebrew.” This is basically what we read in most prose texts from Genesis to Kings, in contrast to the later books (e.g., Chronicles), which are written in “Late Biblical Hebrew.” This makes an important contribution to the debate about the dating of biblical writings.

Now that we are more familiar with the Old Hebrew script, what do we know of its history?

The earliest inscriptions that bear some features distinctive of this script date from the first half of the ninth century B.C.E. and come from a handful of sites, notably Tel Rehov in the Jordan Valley. To go further and try to understand the genesis of this script, it may be helpful to look at the big picture.

The Old Hebrew writing system is a member of a family of alphabetic scripts that had the same overall appearance with subtle variations. They were used in various areas: Edom, Moab, Ammon, the Aramean kingdoms, Phoenicia, and Philistia. All descend from the same mother alphabet attested in Egypt and in Canaan during the second millennium: the Early Alphabetic script (also called the Proto-Sinaitic script).^c

The first local daughter script to crystallize was the so-called Phoenician alphabet, at the very end of the second millennium B.C.E. It is particularly well illustrated in royal inscriptions from the city of Byblos dated to the tenth and ninth centuries. According to a widespread view, all the other Levantine alphabets derive from it. This was the case with Aramaic—but also with Greek, from which Latin indirectly derives. The script you see when reading this article ultimately comes from Early Alphabetic script!

That said, it is debated whether the Old Hebrew script is a daughter of the Phoenician 052alphabet or its cousin (stemming from a parallel branch). The strongest argument in favor of the former hypothesis is that the Old Hebrew script has only 22 letters, as in Phoenician. This is fewer than what was available in the Early Alphabetic script, at least initially. Yet the Hebrew language, which has more consonants, would have required more letters.

However, a growing number of inscriptions from Israel and Judah indicate that the Early Alphabetic script was not replaced by Phoenician but remained there until a relatively late date (c. the tenth century B.C.E.). Moreover, some findings attest transitional stages between the Early Alphabetic script and Old Hebrew. For instance, this seems to be the case in inscriptions found in successive archaeological strata from the tenth to ninth centuries at Tel Rehov. As a result, many scholars today regard the Old Hebrew script as descended from the Early Alphabetic script without the mediation of Phoenician. To account for the limited number of letters in Hebrew, they nevertheless admit some influence from the Phoenician tradition or consider that the reduction to 22 letters had already happened in some branch of the Early Alphabetic tradition.

From its appearance, in the early ninth century at the latest, to the destruction of Jerusalem in 587/6 B.C.E., the Old Hebrew script flourished and left us the corpus we have mentioned above. In the meantime, however, a cousin script that would eventually replace it was gaining importance in the Near East. During 053the Neo-Assyrian (c. 900–609 B.C.E.), the Neo-Babylonian (c. 609–539 B.C.E.), and especially the Persian (c. 539–332 B.C.E.) periods, people increasingly used the Aramaic alphabet for international exchanges and trade.

It is against this background that we can understand why the Judean scribes, exiled to Babylonia in the early sixth century, switched to the Aramaic script for most uses. In the following centuries, everyday documents in Judah were written in this script. In the Hellenistic period (c. 332–63 B.C.E.), it evolved into a “Jewish” script attested in the Dead Sea scrolls, notably in its “Herodian” variety (c. 30 B.C.E.–70 C.E.); it was also used to write Hebrew, hence the “square Hebrew” script.

But this does not mean that the Old Hebrew script was completely abandoned in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem. It reappeared during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Both the Hasmoneans (in the second and first centuries B.C.E.) and the leaders of the two Jewish revolts (in the first and second centuries C.E.) minted coins with Old Hebrew legends. In addition, at least 18 Dead Sea Scrolls, most of which are copies of books of the Pentateuch, were written in it.⁵

But what happened between the fall of Jerusalem and the Hellenistic period?

According to a scenario that remains popular, a complete gap occurred: The Old Hebrew script remained “dead” until the Hasmoneans resuscitated it as a symbol of “national” awakening. A number of discoveries, however, have helped to narrow the gap.

First, a few Mesopotamian clay tablets from the middle of the sixth century B.C.E., written in cuneiform, but with personal names in Old Hebrew written on the edge, have surfaced.⁶ Thus, some Judeans still used their old script a few decades after they had been exiled.

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Second, small Old Hebrew inscriptions from the fourth century B.C.E. have been found: coins (often bearing the legend “Yehud,” i.e., Judah), as well as a couple of bullae and seals. Only the fifth century is not represented in the inscriptional record. Furthermore, the dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls written in Old Hebrew is still a matter of debate. The few available radiocarbon dates fall into the last two centuries B.C.E. and the first century C.E. Paleography points to the same time frame, with a few scrolls possibly being older, although it is difficult to tell by how much.⁷

It remains possible that the Old Hebrew script disappeared and was then reactivated only for a few symbolic uses on coins and seals in the fourth century B.C.E. But another scenario is plausible: The Old Hebrew script was never completely abandoned. Several observations support this hypothesis.

First, what happened to the Hebrew literature written in the Old Hebrew script before (and possibly during) the Exile, including early redactions of biblical books? Is it likely that the Judean scribes “converted” the script of all these writings into Aramaic in the wake of the Exile? That would entail some of their successors reverting to the Old Hebrew script for at least 18 copies, thus producing the Dead Sea Scrolls written in Old Hebrew that we possess.

A more economical hypothesis assumes that at least some of these writings were continuously read, copied, and revised in the Old Hebrew script. In fact, biblical books in Old Hebrew were certainly available in the Hellenistic period. Indeed, there are indications that some Hebrew manuscripts used for the Greek translation of the Bible (the Septuagint) were written in Old Hebrew. Some surprising renderings are due to the confusion between Hebrew letters that can only happen in this script.⁸

Second, the Old Hebrew script evolved and changed between the sixth and the fourth centuries B.C.E.: Inscriptions from the latter already exhibit some new features. This is easy to explain if the Old Hebrew tradition was continuous. Even when we surmise that coin engravers tried to use formal and “archaic-looking” letterforms, they could not help introducing more recent letterforms, which suggests an ongoing development. In addition, the characters sometimes bear features that are typical of a cursive script, which points to a frequent use on other media.

A continuous use of Old Hebrew throughout the Second Temple period is therefore plausible, even though likely restricted to very small circles and limited purposes.

In the end, the Jews abandoned the Old Hebrew script not long after the repression of Bar Kokhba’s revolt (c. 135 C.E.). Yet it did not entirely disappear. The Samaritans apparently never abandoned the Old Hebrew script—and their association with it might be the reason 055why it came to displease Jewish literates. Already in the fourth century B.C.E, a couple of seal impressions with Old Hebrew legends come from the Wadi Daliyeh, in Samaria. In addition, the excavations of Mt. Gerizim, where the Samaritan temple stood, have uncovered seven Old Hebrew inscriptions, dating probably from the second century B.C.E. Much later, in the fourth century C.E., we find the first attestations of the Samaritan script proper. It is clearly a daughter of the Old Hebrew script, with many ornamental features and a cursive aspect.

In the meantime, transitional letterforms appear in a few documents: in the so-called Abba inscription, found in a first-century C.E. tomb in Jerusalem, and sporadically in Old Hebrew scrolls from the Dead Sea.

In sum, the Old Hebrew script was still developing at the turn of our era. Then a new chapter in the “biography” of Old Hebrew opened thanks to the Samaritans, who developed this script into a new one, which they still read today in their liturgy.

From biblical texts to royal inscriptions, see how the Old Hebrew script—the alphabet used by the inhabitants of Judah and Israel during the monarchic period—developed, evolved, and surprisingly survived over a millennium.