Alphabet and Internet

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One of my most vivid memories comes from my first year in graduate school, when I took a class from Professor Frank Cross on the religion of ancient Israel. For the first couple of weeks, there was little discussion of religion. Instead, Cross systematically led us through the development of the Hebrew alphabet. Letter by letter, he carefully and even lovingly drew for us the shapes he knew so well, from the earliest pictograms like the bull’s head aleph to the familiar Aramaic-influenced “square” script.

In response to our obvious bewilderment at why he was “wasting time” on something “irrelevant to the Bible,” Cross explained that the alphabet was a Canaanite invention and that biblical Hebrew was a form of Canaanite. Thus the Bible was a record of this early invention. Then he asked the class to consider why the alphabet should rank alongside the wheel as one of humankind’s greatest inventions.¹

Cross’s letter-littered blackboard and his rather Socratic question came to mind recently when I was struck by a formal similarity between a group of ancient Hebrew seals and modern e-mail addresses.

Seals were used to mark ownership or authorship. They were stamped into clay jars to claim ownership of the contents, or were pressed into small lumps of clay (called bullae) used to seal papyrus documents.

One type of Hebrew seal in use during the century and a half prior to the Babylonian Exile (586 B.C.E.) was inscribed not with a pictorial image but simply with the letters of the owner’s name and (usually) the owner’s father’s name (called a patronymic). For example, in the seal illustrated here, the owner’s name, H.ilqiyahu, is preceded by a lamed (Hebrew for “belonging to”) and followed by bn (“son of”) and the father’s name, ‘Adayahu. The form is standard: “Belonging to x son of y.” (There are also a number of seals or impressions with women’s names.)

Our e-mail addresses also have a standard format, namely some version of our name (which can be a nickname or alias) followed by the @ sign and an additional identifying detail, our server or organization or company with the appropriate .com, .edu or .org.

An inscribed seal, like an e-mail address, indicates the owner’s identity. And, as anthropologists and linguists and philosophers tell us, personal identity is an extremely complex concept. For example, an inscribed seal and an e-mail address both stand for the owner, rendering him or her, in a certain sense, present despite physical absence. (Consider how in the Song of Songs 8:6—“Set me as a seal upon your heart”—the seal maintains the lover’s presence.)

There are several other points of comparison. Note the brevity of both forms of identification. It does not take much space for either medium to encapsulate essential data. Further, both the seal and the e-mail address label larger or longer items—a letter, a legal document, business records, etc. Finally, inscribed seals and e-mail addresses do their work using, for the most part, letters of the alphabet.

Millions of people around the world have e-mail addresses. Of course, we do not have millions of inscribed Hebrew seals or seal impressions—it’s more like hundreds. Nevertheless, these Hebrew seals suggest that the ability to identify the name of the owner of a seal mattered a great deal. A significant number of Israelites must have 054been familiar enough with reading and writing to be able to read those names.

This brings me back to the invention of the alphabet and Cross’s question. Until the Canaanites invented the alphabet in the early second millennium B.C.E., reading and writing required years of scribal training to learn the hundreds of syllabic signs in Egyptian hieroglyphics or Akkadian cuneiform. Because only the ruling elite of court and temple could afford to subsidize a scribal establishment, they also controlled what was written. The alphabet, however, has only a few signs (22 in Hebrew), which could be learned quickly by anyone. What this means in theory is that the ruling elite no longer enjoyed exclusive control of information and theirs was no longer the only story told. Other voices could make themselves heard.

Cross and others² have suggested it is no coincidence that the substantial increase in archaeological evidence for writing in ancient Israel between the mid-eighth century and the Exile coincides precisely with the era of the classical Israelite prophets. The prophet’s voice was an alternative to that of the ruling kings; it provided an alternative ideology. For example, in 1 Kings 3, God speaks directly to the king. God appears to Solomon in a dream and grants the king “a wise and discerning mind” along with “riches and glory” (1 Kings 3:12–13; see also Psalm 2:7). But the prophets often reject the notion that God speaks to kings. Rather, God speaks to the prophets. In Isaiah 7, God even tells the prophet to pass a message on to King Ahaz: “Go meet Ahaz…and say to him…” (Isaiah 7:3–4).

E-mail and the Internet fit on the same continuum begun by the Canaanites with their alphabet, carried along by the Hebrew prophets and, elsewhere, by the Greek philosophers, who also wrote in an alphabet borrowed from the Canaanites. The Internet has meant that authoritarian governments cannot control their citizens’ access to information from the outside world. The alphabet is arguably part of the essential DNA of liberation and human dignity, the same values that inspired the prophets so many centuries ago.

One of my most vivid memories comes from my first year in graduate school, when I took a class from Professor Frank Cross on the religion of ancient Israel. For the first couple of weeks, there was little discussion of religion. Instead, Cross systematically led us through the development of the Hebrew alphabet. Letter by letter, he carefully and even lovingly drew for us the shapes he knew so well, from the earliest pictograms like the bull’s head aleph to the familiar Aramaic-influenced “square” script. In response to our obvious bewilderment at why he was “wasting time” on something […]