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The Books and the Parchments
By
F. F. Bruce
London: Pickering & Ingilis
1950
Boise, Idaho: Global Affairs Publishing Company
P. O. Box 16184. Boise, Idaho 83715
Copyright © 2007 by Michael L. Chadwick. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2007 of Electronic Texts by Michael L. Chadwick. All rights reserved. No part of this electronic text may be reproduced, distributed, stored in electronic databases, personal computers, search engine databases, web sites or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. Electronic fingerprints have been placed in the text to prevent copyright violations.
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1—The Books and the Parchments
Chapter 2—The Bible and the Alphabet
Chapter 3—The Hebrew Language
Chapter 4―The Aramaic Language
Chapter 5―The Greek Language
Chapter 6―The Two Testaments
Chapter 7―The Form of the Bible
Chapter 8―The Canon of Scripture
Chapter 9―The Text of the Old Testament
Chapter 10—The Samaritan Pentateuch
Chapter 11―The Targums
Chapter 12―The Old Testament in Greek
Chapter 13―The Apocryphal Books
Chapter 14—The Text of the New Testament
Chapter 15―The Syriac Bible
Chapter 16―The Latin Bible
Chapter 17—Other Early Versions
Chapter 18―The English Bible
Appendix I—Lost Books
Appendix II―The New Testament Apocrypha and Other Early Christian Books
Appendix III―Suggestions for Further Study
Preface
This volume gathers together a number of articles written and papers read at various times on the transmission of the Bible. It is intended for non-specialists like those who have read them or heard them in their earlier forms, and who have frequently expressed a desire to have them in this form.
It is gratifying to mark the eagerness with which people of widely divergent interests listen to a simple account of how the Bible has come down to us. In revising these chapters I have tried to bear in mind the questions which are most frequently asked about these matters, and to answer them to the best of my ability. I hope that the volume may thus prove interesting and useful to the many who, without aiming at any specialist knowledge of Biblical learning, would welcome a handbook dealing with these questions.
The mixed origin of the contents no doubt betrays itself in a certain haphazardness in the topics selected, though I have tried to smooth out the worst roughnesses and cut down too much overlapping.
The three chapters on the Biblical languages are not intended to teach readers the elements of these languages but simply to say some interesting things about them.
There are many aspects of Biblical study which are not touched upon here. Questions of higher criticism, introduction, exegesis, and even of Biblical archaeology, interesting as they are, lie outside the scope of the volume. So also does the theological approach to the Bible (although theology has done its best to creep into Chapters VI, VII, and VIII). The background of the work, however, is the conviction that (in the words of the Shorter Catechism) ‘the word of God, which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him’, and thus attain the chief end and highest good of our existence.
There is little that is original in these pages, and my debts to others are acknowledged throughout the work. In all that concerns the text of the Old Testament, whether in its original Hebrew or in early versions, I must (in common with all students of these matters) make particular acknowledgment of the help received from the writings of Dr. Paul Kahle, the quintessence of whose life-work has lately been made accessible to English readers in The Cairo Geniza. Mr. G. C. D. Howley has given valued help in the reading of the proofs. Nor should I omit a word of gratitude to all those whose keen interest in the subjects here dealt with has encouraged me to present them in this form. A teacher of any subject, and especially of Biblical studies, can have no greater reward than to see others fired with enthusiasm for his subject.—F. F. Bruce
Department of Biblical History and Literature,
University of Sheffield,
March, 1950.
Chapter 1—The Books and the Parchments
About the middle of last century there came to light a letter in William Tyndale’s hand, written in Latin to someone in authority (possibly the Marquis of Bergen), which had lain unread in the archives of the Council of Brabant for three hundred years. The letter has a special human interest because it was written during the last winter of Tyndale’s life (1535-36) while he lay in prison ‘for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus’, and it shows us how the great Bible translator’s enthusiasm for his work remained unimpaired to the last, in spite of the most discouraging circumstances. This is what he wrote:
“I believe, right worshipful, that you are not unaware of what may have been determined concerning me. Wherefore I beg your lordship, and that by the Lord Jesus, that if I am to remain here through the winter, you will request the commissary to have the kindness to send me, from the goods of mine which he has, a warmer cap, for I suffer greatly from cold in the head, and am afflicted by a perpetual catarrh, which is much increased in this cell; a warmer coat also, for this which I have is very thin; a piece of cloth, too, to patch my leggings.
My overcoat is worn out; my shirts also are worn out. He has a woolen shirt, if he will be good enough to send it. I have also with him leggings of thicker cloth to put on above; he has also warmer night-caps. And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening; it is indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark.
But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency to be urgent with the commissary, that he will kindly permit me to have the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar and Hebrew dictionary, that I may pass the time in that study. In return may you obtain what you most desire, so only that it be for the salvation of your soul. But if any other decision has been taken concerning me, to be carried out before winter, I will be patient, abiding the will of God, to the glory of the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ; whose Spirit (I pray) may ever direct your heart. Amen.
W. Tindalus
It requires little imagination to sympathize with his desire for warmer clothes; a damp, draughty, unheated cell is no place to pass the winter in, and it is difficult to concentrate the mind on study if the body is shivering. But we get the impression that Tyndale’s desire for warmer clothes was but a means to an end; he wished to reduce his bodily discomfort sufficiently to let his mind get on with its chosen work. Most of all he wants his Hebrew books. And why? Because a good part of the Old Testament remained to be translated. Some years previously he had translated the New Testament into English (the first time that it had ever been englished from the Greek original), and he was at work on the first translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew into English when he was arrested. The Pentateuch had been published in 1530; the historical books had also been translated but not yet published. So he was anxious to press on with the task. But the completion of it must be left to others; on the 6th October, Tyndale himself, in the words of John Foxe, ‘was brought forth to the place of execution, was there tied to the stake, and then strangled first by the hangman, and afterwards with fire consumed, in the morning at the town of Vilvorde, A.D. 1536; crying thus at the stake with a fervent zeal and a loud voice: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes”’.
We cannot read the letter which Tyndale wrote from prison without remembering the remarkably similar request made by the Apostle Paul in remarkably similar circumstances. It was just before the last winter of his life, while he lay in prison in Rome awaiting the death-sentence and the executioner’s sword (according to the traditional account), that he sent a message to his friend, Timothy, in Asia Minor: ‘Do your best to come to me soon.... When you come, bring the cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus, and the books, especially the parchments.... Do your best to come before winter’.
[There is an interesting reference to this passage of Scripture in F. W. Newman’s Phases of Faith (1850), pp. 29 f. In recording his intercourse with one whom he calls ‘the Irish Clergyman’ (actually J. H. Darby), Newman says: “I once said: But do you really think that no part of the New Testament may have been temporary in its object? For istance, what should we have lost if St. Pual had never written the verse, ‘The cloak which I have left at Troas, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments.’ He answered with the greatest promptitude: “I should certainly have lost something; for that is exactly the verse which alone saved me from selling my little library. No! every word, depend upon it, is from the Spirit, and is for eternal service.”’]
The comfort of the body is not to be neglected, but something to occupy the mind is the main thing. ‘Most of all … the Hebrew Bible’ was Tyndale’s plea; ‘especially the parchments’ was Paul’s.
It has been suggested that the word translated ‘cloak’ in Paul’s message was not really a cloak. The Greek word is phailonēs, borrowed from the Latin paenula; and sometimes it means a piece of cloth to wrap round books to protect them against the weather. And it is suggested that Paul was more concerned about protecting his books than about protecting his body. Perhaps we can have it both ways. Paul may have left his cloak at Troas wrapped round the books, but in view of his reference to the approach of winter it is not difficult to surmise that he asked Timothy to bring it so that he could wrap it round himself. And then, with a little less discomjfort, he could get down to the books and the parchments.
But what were these books, and what were the parchments which Paul was so specially anxious to have? The Greek words that he uses to indicate them are interesting; they denote primarily
the material of which the two classes of documents were made. The word for ‘book’ is biblion, and that for ‘parchment’ is membrana.
A biblion was more particularly a roll of papyrus or byblus. This was a reed-plant, growing beside rivers and marshes and such places, the inner bark of which was extracted and dried in flat strips. When these strips were dried, a row of them was laid side by side, and above this another row was laid in criss-cross fashion, and the two rows were gummed together. The result was a piece of writing material. Several of these pieces could be joined together end to end so as to form a long strip which was then rolled up into a scroll of convenient size, called in Greek a biblos or biblion. This name was derived from one of the names of the plant itself, byblos, which was derived in turn from the name of a town in Phoenicia which the Greeks knew as Byblos.
[Its Phoenician name was Begal: in this form it is named in the Old Testament (Psa. 83. 7; Ezek. 27. 9; its inhabitants are called Bebalites in Josh. 13. 5; 1 Kings 5. 18). See further on page 21 f., 29.]
(The form biblion is really a diminutive of biblos, but lost its diminutive sense. In the New Testament biblion simply means a ‘roll’ or ‘book’; when a diminutive word is required, as for the little book which John was told to eat in Rev. 10. 9, the form biblaridion is used.) It is from biblion, in fact, that our word ‘Bible’ is derived. The plural of biblion is biblia, and the whole collection of Old and New Testament books came to be known by Greek-speaking Christians as to biblia, ‘the books’. Latin-speaking Christians then borrowed the word biblia but treated it as a singular noun, and from its Latin use the English word ‘Bible’' and similar forms in many other languages have been derived.
The other documents which Paul asked Timothy to bring were parchments. The Greek word here is membrana, a word borrowed from Latin, from which, of course, comes our English word ‘membrane’. This is an animal and not a vegetable product, the skin of sheep, goats, antelopes, and similar animals, which was shaved and scraped to provide a more durable writing material than papyrus. The word ‘parchment’ comes from the name of the city of Pergamum, in Asia Minor, for the production of this writing material was at one time specially associated with that place. Another name for the same material is vellum.
In New Testament times parchment, being more durable and more costly than papyrus, was used chiefly for documents of greater value, or for such as were constantly in use and were, therefore, exposed to greater wear and tear. What the parchments were which Paul so particularly desired Timothy to bring we cannot be sure, but it is a reasonable guess that they contained portions of Holy Scripture.
A book with pages in the form familiar to us was not used in New Testament times, though this kind of book (known technically as a codex) made its appearance not long after the end of the
apostolic age and quickly became popular in Christian circles. The books mentioned in the Bible were rolls of papyrus. The use of papyrus for writing purposes in Egypt goes back to c. 3000 B.C., and we have evidence that by the end of the twelfth century B. C. it was exported in large quantities from Egypt to Phoenicia for the same purpose. Such a papyrus roll is that which John saw in his vision of heaven (Rev. 5. 1), which contained so much writing that the outside (verso) was covered with it as well as the inside (recto), and which when rolled up was secured with seven seals. Usually rolls bore writing on one side only, the side on which the fibres ran horizontally and which was therefore easier to write on. The Roman poet Juvenal satirizes one of his contemporaries who wrote a tragedy called Orestes, which was inordinately long—so long that it covered the outside of a roll as well as the inside, and was not finished even then:
scriptus et in tergo necdum finitus Orestes!
[‘Orestes, written on the back as well and even so
not yet finished’ (Juvenal, Satire, i. 6).]
The longest books of the New Testament (which, in descending order of length, are Luke, Acts, Matthew, John) represent the amount of written matter which a roll of normal size contained. A roll could not exceed a certain length without becoming inconvenient for use. One of the reasons why Christian communities so quickly adopted the codex form in preference to the roll form, from the beginning of the second century onwards, was probably that the new form allowed them to have several documents together in one book, such as the four Gospels, or the collection of Pauline epistles, and later, of course, the New Testament or even the whole Bible. The writing on a roll was arranged in columns of convenient breadth. In the account of the roll of Jeremiah’s prophecies that was read in the presence of King Jehoiakim (Jer. 36. 21-25), it was not three or four leaves that Jehudi read, as the text of the A.V. and R.V. says, but three or four columns, as the R.V. margin rightly has it; Jehudi had no time to read more, for the king seized the roll, cut it up and threw it into the brazier. As the roll was read it was unwound with one hand and wound up with the other, rollers being provided round which it could more easily be wound.
When the roll was wound up, a slip containing the title of the work and the name of the author was usually pasted on the outside. This could easily fall off, leaving the work without a name. It may be that something like this happened to the Epistle to the Hebrews. This Epistle bears no writer’s name, although it was not intended to be an anonymous letter; its recipients no doubt knew quite well who had sent it to them. A number of rolls would be kept together in a cylindrical box, which the Romans called a capsa. If an anonymous roll were kept in a box along with a number of other rolls by a known author, the nameless roll was apt to be credited to that author too. Thus, if the Epistle to the Hebrews was kept along with letters of Paul, it was not unnatural that Paul’s name should come to be attached to it.
For writing on papyrus or parchment a pen and ink were used, as is indicated in 3 John 13, where the Elder has much to say to Gaius which he is unwilling to communicate by means of ‘ink and pen’. (In a similar passage in 2 John 12 the phrase ‘paper and ink’ is used, where the Greek word for ‘paper’ is chartēs, another word for papyrus.) The pen was a reed (Greek kalamos), pointed at the end. The ink was compounded of charcoal, gum and water; the Greek word used by John is simply melan, i.e. ‘black’.
Temporary notes were often made with a metal stylus or stiletto on a wax tablet—a flat piece of wood covered with a film of wax. The writing could be effaced by being rubbed over with the blunt end of the stylus. A very widespread writing material favoured by the common people was a piece of unglazed pottery, which readily took ink. Great numbers of these inscribed potsherds—ostraca, to give them their technical name—have been found in Egypt and Palestine. They served for writing letters, for keeping accounts, and a hundred and one other purposes.
The most durable form of writing is that referred to in Job 19. 24, the engraving of rock-inscriptions with an ‘iron pen’. Another very durable form of writing, widely used in the Middle East in Old Testament times, was with a sharp instrument on tablets of soft clay, which were then baked hard. Vast quantities of these clay tablets have come to light, principally in the Euphrates-Tigris valley, where the kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria flourished, but also in Persia, Syria, Asia Minor and Egypt. A line incised in a clay tablet with the three-sided stylus with bevelled head favoured for this purpose was naturally thicker at the beginning of the stroke than at the end, and this produces the characteristic appearance of the wedge-shaped or `cuneiform' script in which so many languages of Western Asia were written.
These brick tablets were very durable, but their bulk and weight made them terribly inconvenient. Our paper books are heavy enough in all conscience, as we know to our cost when even a modest library has to be moved by road or rail; but imagination staggers at the problems that would arise if we had to keep their equivalent in inscribed bricks! Papyrus, on the other hand, was very convenient, but not at all durable. Only in such conditions as are provided by the dry sands of Egypt and the volcanic ash of Herculaneum have papyrus documents been preserved; in humid climates they soon rotted away. So, while we can read the original inscriptions of the Assyrian and Babylonian kings and the notes which common people wrote on pieces of pottery in eighth-century Samaria and sixth-century Lachish, the autographs of the Hebrew prophets who were their contemporaries have disappeared long ago, as also have the autographs of all the other Biblical writers, most—probably all—of whom wrote on papyrus. But these autographs were copied before they perished, and throughout the intervening centuries they have been copied and re-copied continually. Until the invention of printing five centuries ago all this copying had to be done laboriously by hand, one copy at a time; since then, the printing presses have sent out whole editions where previously single manuscripts were produced by individual scribes.
Chapter 2—The Bible and the Alphabet
When we speak of the Bible, we use a word which originally referred to a particular kind of writing material. When we speak of the Scriptures, we use a word which etymologically denotes the writing and not the material. We have discussed the early forms of writing material; now we are to think of early forms of writing.
The invention of printing in Europe in the fifteenth century A.D. was an event of great importance in the history of the transmission of the Biblical text, as well as in the general history of culture. But we sometimes forget that it is far outweighed in importance by the invention of writing. Without the invention of writing we should have had no Bible at all, for the Bible is God’s Word written. God’s Word came to the fathers through the prophets and became incarnate in Jesus Christ; but we should be very much poorer if we had no written record of what God said but had to rely on oral tradition. That, of course, might have mattered less if phonographic methods of recording the spoken word had been in use in Biblical times. But these methods are, in fact, of recent invention, whereas writing was in use in those days and so was naturally the means employed for perpetuating the revelation of God.
The first person who is represented in the Bible as writing anything is Moses. There are six things which Moses in the Pentateuch is explicitly said to have written: (1) the memorial concerning Amalek; [Exod. 17. 14.] (2) the Book of the Covenant; [Exod. 24. 4.] (3) the Ten Commandments; [Exod. 34. 27, 28.] (4) the itinerary of the Israelites in the wilderness; [Num. 33. 2.] (5) the Deuteronomic law-code; [Deut. 31. 9. 24.] (6) the Song reproduced in Deut. 32. [Deut. 31. 22.] At one time it was widely supposed that Moses was the first man who ever committed anything to writing, and that he learned the art directly from God * (possibly when he received the two Tables of the Law at Sinai inscribed by ‘the finger of God’). [Exod. 31. 18.]
[* The idea is at least as early as the second century B.C., when it was put forward by the Hellenistic Jewish writer, Eupolemus. It is interesting, however, to note that Josephus ascribes the art of writing to the generations immediately following Adam, perhaps thinking particularly of Enoch, who is regarded by some forms of Jewish and Samaritan tradition as having committed divine revelations to writing.]
This was a perfectly reasonable supposition in days when no writing was known earlier than the time of Moses; now, however, we can look at actual records written many hundreds of years before Moses, written more than 5,000 years ago.
Writing is not the only method of keeping memoranda and communicating information otherwise than by word of mouth; other devices are known, such as those practised by the American
Indians and by the Peruvians in the Inca Age. But none of these other devices has proved capable of being developed to anything like the same degree as writing. Writing developed out of drawing; and something of the development of the art of writing can be grasped if we compare a modern treatise on some abstract subject with the earliest known forms of picture-writing.
The form of writing with which we are specially concerned in this chapter, however, is alphabetic writing, not simply because it is the form of writing which we practise ourselves (by contrast, for example, with the Chinese), but especially because the Bible, as far as we can tell, was from the beginning written in alphabetic writing. Alphabetic writing is the form of writing which has a distinct character for every significant sound in a language—in principle, at least, for in practice (as we know in English) the same sound may be indicated by more letters than one and the same letter may be pronounced in more ways than one.
[Thus the same sound is denoted by c., as in car; by k, as in kerb; by kh, as in khaki; by ck, as in sack; by ch, as in chasm; by gh, as in hough. The letter g is pronounced differently in get and gem; and think of the variety of ways in which gh is pronounced! English, of course, is a notorious example of defective correspondence between sound and symbol; but the same defect is present in degree in all written languages.]'
In tracing the development of writing in general and of alphabetic writing in particular it is a good scheme to begin with our own alphabet and work backward, for then we are proceeding from the well known to the less well known, and that is always a sound method. Our English alphabet has twenty-six letters: ABCDEFGHIJKLMN0PQRSTUVWXYZ. We need concern ourselves only with the capitals; the ‘lower case’ letters are simply modifications of these. We have inherited our alphabet in the first instance from the Romans, along with several other useful things. The Roman alphabet, however, had only twenty-three letters: A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z. Our I and J are by origin variant forms of one and the same Roman letter; the same is true of U and V; while W is just what we call it, a double U (or, as the French call it, a double V). As for the Latin alphabet of twenty-three letters, its last two letters, Y and Z, were imported from the Greek alphabet in the first century B.C., not to represent true Latin sounds, but to help the Romans to represent certain Greek words more accurately in their alphabet—those Greek words containing the letters Υ (upsilon), which was pronounced like the modified u in French or the German , and Z (zeta), which was pronounced like dz or zd. Neither of these sounds was found in any native Latin word. Before these two letters were appended, then, the Roman alphabet had only twenty-one letters.
The Romans in their turn received the alphabet from the Etruscans, and the Etruscans received it from the Greeks—more particularly from those Greeks who had settled in Southern Italy from the eighth to the sixth centuries B.C. There were variations between the various forms of alphabets used by the Greeks, but in all of them the third letter, Γ (gamma), had the voiced sound of g as in English gather. How comes it, then, that the third letter in the Roman alphabet, C, has the unvoiced sound of c as in English can? It is not that the Romans had no use for the voiced sound of g; they had, and if they had derived their alphabet direct from the Greeks, they would have pronounced C like Greek gamma, the more so as there were already two letters in the alphabet which had the sound of c in can—namely K and Q. but the Etruscans had no voiced g sound in their language, so when they took over the Greek alphabet they gave gamma the corresponding unvoiced sound (as though the name of the letter were pronounced kamma). Thus, in the alphabet which the Romans took over from the Etruscans, there were three letters which had practically the same unvoiced sound—C, K, and Q. Later, when the Romans felt the need of a separate letter for the g sound, they used G, which was really a variant form of C, and put it in the seventh place in the alphabet was the place occupied by the Greek letter zeta, but, as we have seen, the Romans had no such sound, and so they jettisoned it from the alphabet, little thinking that their descendants would one day bring it back and put it at the end of the alphabet. They also jettisoned five other letters from the Greek alphabet since they had no sounds corresponding to them.
There were numerous varieties of the Greek alphabet in use all over the Greek world, from Asia Minor to Marseilles. One of these was the ‘West Greek’ alphabet, from which the Roman alphabet was derived through Etruscan intermediation. Another was the ‘East Greek’ or ‘Ionic’ alphabet, which was introduced at Athens in 403 B.C., and in time replaced the local varieties of alphabet in other parts of Greece. This is the alphabet of twenty-four letters which we commonly call the ‘Greek alphabet’. The following table will help to show the relation which these two forms of Greek alphabet bore to each other and to the Roman alphabet. Note that, so far as the table goes, it indicates the relationship of the letters and not of the sounds which they represented.
[This table is simplified; the earlier inscriptions in each of these alphabets show a greater variety of forms than it is necessary to indicate here. The three letters omitted from the san or sampi to denote 900 (for which purpose it was placed after omega, the sign for 800), and koppa to denote 90. Twenty-seven letters instead of the normal twenty-four of the Ionic alphabet were required to denote the numerals, the units from 1 to 9, the tens from 10 to 90, and the hundreds from 100 to 900; hence these three letters, otherwise jettisoned, were still used in this way. Similarly, three Greek letters which were not used in the Latin alphabet were employed as Latin numerals: Ө (theta) as 100 (later simplified to C, the more naturally as C is the initial of Lat. Centum, ‘hundred’; Φ (phi) as 1,000 (later simplified to M., the more naturally as M is the initial of Lat. Mille, ‘thousand’); the sign Φ when halved (D) denoted the half of 1,000 (500); Ψ (West Greek khi, Ionic psi) denoted 50 (it was simplified to ⊥ and then to L).]
One of the chief differences between the West Greek and the Ionic alphabet is that in the former H represents an aspirate sound, while in the latter (since most of the Ionic Greeks dropped their aitches) there was no need of a letter to indicate the aspirate sound, and so H (eta) was used to represent a long open e sound, similar to the sound of ea in English bear. In this as in some other respects, such as its retention of the letters digamma (whence F) and koppa (whence Q), and its giving to X the value of ks and not kh, the West Greek alphabet, along with the Roman alphabet, was nearer to the original Greek alphabet than the Ionic alphabet was. The earliest inscriptions in the Greek alphabet occur in Athens and the islands of Thera, Melos and Crete; they belong to the ninth or eighth century B.C.
Greek tradition derives the alphabet from the Phoenicians. It is significant that Cadmus, whom the Greeks regarded as having introduced the alphabet among them, was not only a Phoenician according to legend, but bears a Phoenician name. The Cadmus legend is well worth studying for its own sake, but all we need to say here is that the traditional Greek ascription of their alphabet to the Phoenicians is confirmed by the actual facts of the case. The earliest form of the Greek alphabet is the Phoenician alphabet, with a few adaptations to the necessities of the Greek language, which was a totally different language from the Semitic tongue of the Phoenicians. The most important of these adaptations was the use of five Phoenician letters (which in the Semitic alphabet represented three gutturals and two semi-vowels) to indicate Greek vowels.
[Why five? There were seven distinct simple vowel-sounds in classical Greek (quite apart from differences of quantity)— those represented in the Ionic alphabet by α, ε, η, ι, ο, υ, ω. But there were five vowels in the Cypriote syllabary, and possibly the pre-Greek system of writing which originated in Crete and spread from there to Cyprus and elsewhere had some influence on the adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet to Greek usage. Sir George Hill, History of Cyprus, Vol. I (1940), p. 53, where further reference is made to Rhys Carpenter in the American Journal of Archaeology, 42 (1938), p. 67.]
All twenty-two letters of the Phoenician alphabet represented consonants. Of the five Phoenician letters which the Greeks adapted as vowel-signs, four represented Semitic sounds which were not required in Greek speech. These were the gutturals corresponding to Hebrew א (᾿aleph), ה (he), and צ (‘ayin), and the semi-vowel indicatd in Hebrew by י (yod). But one of the letters used by the Greeks to denote a vowel-sound-Semitic waw, used as Greek Υ (υ, upsilon), was also required by the Greeks in its original function as the letter indicating the semi-vowel w.
So the Greeks used it twice over in their alphabet, in two variant forms—once in its Semitic position, No. 6, to denote the w sound, and again as an extra letter at the end of the alphabet, No. 23, in its new character as the vowel-letter upsilon. As No. 6 among the Greek letters, with the value of w and the name digamma, it appeared in the West Greek alphabet and most of the other local Greek alphabets, but was lacking in the Ionic alphabet, because the Greeks who originally used the Ionic alphabet stopped using the w sound. It is therefore absent from the classical Greek alphabet, which is based on the Ionic form. The letters which follow υ (upsilon) in the Greek alphabet were added a considerable time after the Greeks originally acquired the alphabet from the Phoenicians and do not concern us at this stage in our inquiry.
Not only the forms of the Greek letters, but the names of most of them, betray their Semitic origin. For most of the names were taken over into Greek along with the letters. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on, are meaningless in Greek except as names of the letters which they denote; but the Phoenician names which lie behind them, which are practically identical with the Hebrew forms ᾿aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, and so on, are not only the names of letters but have a meaning of their own besides—they appear for the most part to denote the objects originally represented by the shapes of the respective letters in the earliest form of the Semitic alphabet, namely, ox, house, throw-stick, ** door, etc.
[** So G. R. Driver, Semitic Writing (1948), pp. 155, 163 f. Another and older suggestion
is that gimel means ‘camel.’ The association between ‘throw-stick’ and ‘camel’ may not appear so far-fetched if we consider that there may be a boomerang-like quality about that animal’s recalcitrance.]
The Semitic alphabet from which the Greeks derived theirs was written from right to left, as four forms of the Semitic alphabet—Hebrew, Samaritan, Arabic, Syriac—are written to the present day. The earliest Greek writing also ran from right to left. After a time the Greeks introduced the practice of writing alternate lines from right to left and from left to right; this practice was called writing boustrophēdon (ox-turning-wise), as it resembled the alternate directions followed in ploughing, up one furrow and down the next. This was followed by the third stage, in which the left-to-right direction was standardized, and this has remained the direction in which the Greek alphabet (with its derivative, the Roman alphabet) is written to this day.
This matter of the direction of writing has no such metaphysical significance as some people are inclined to read into it; it is a matter of convention and convenience. For right-handed writers the left-to-right direction has the advantage that one is less likely to smear or deface the words already written. The cuneiform writing of Babylonia and surrounding lands was originally in columns read downwards, arranged from right to left; but after 2500 B.C. or thereabout it regularly ran from left to right. The Egyptian hieroglyphs were usually written from right to left (as the derived hieratic and demotic scripts always were), but sometimes from left to right, and sometimes in vertical columns. The Sinaitic alphabetic script was written indifferently in any of these three directions. The Indian nāgarī script, whose ultimate prototype is the Aramaic form of the Semitic alphabet, is written from left to right. The oldest extant piece of Latin writing runs from right to left (as the early Etruscan alphabet did) this is the inscription of c. 600 B.C. found on a fibula at Prneste (Palestrina) which reads: Manios med ∫he∫haked Numasioi (‘Manios made me for Numasios’). [In classical Latin this would be Manius me fecit Numerio (‘Manius made me for Numerius’).] The earliest extant Latin inscription in stone, which is not later than 400 B.C., is written in vertical columns reading from bottom to top and from top to bottom alternately, the letters lying, as it were, on their sides.
How old is the Phoenician alphabet from which the Greek alphabet is derived? It is found in inscriptions of various kings of Gebal who reigned between the eighteenth and ninth centuries B.C. Gebal, known to the Greeks as Byblos, is (interestingly enough) the city from whose name the Greeks derived one of their names for papyrus [See p. 11.] (and from which in due course our word ‘Bible’
came): we have the record of a large quantity of papyrus which was sent there from Egypt shortly before 1100 B.C.—for what purpose if not for writing? The oldest of these royal inscriptions at Gebal is that of King Shaphatbaal, *** and is dated about 1600 B.C.
[*** The name means ‘Baal has judged’; cf. the recurring Old Testametn name, Shephatiah (2 Sam. 3. 4, and elsewhere), meaning “Jehovah has judged’.]
Then we have two inscriptions from the tomb of King Ahiram of the same city, three or four centuries later. There are also shorter inscriptions, such as a piece of pottery bearing the potter’s name, ‘Abda, son of Kelubay the potter’, from about the same time as Shaphatbaal’s inscription, and a bronze spatula bearing an inscription which contains the owner’s name, Azarbaal, † roughly contemporary with the Ahiram inscriptions.
[† The name means “baal has helped’; in its Carthaginian form Hasdrubal, it appears as the name of a brother and brother-in-law of Hannibal. Cf. the Old Testament name, Azariah, meaning ‘Jehovah has helped’.]
A vessel found in the same city of Gebal, belonging to the time of King Amenemhet IV of Egypt (shortly after 1800 B.C.), has marked on it two signs which are pretty certainly the Phoenician letters ‘ayin and kaph. [See C. F. A. Schaeffer, The Cuneiform Texts of Ras Shamra-Ugarit (1939), p. 36; G. R. Driver, Semitic Writing, p 190.]
So we can trace the Phoenician alphabet back at least to the eighteenth century B.C. We call it rightly the Phoenician alphabet, because in the present state of our knowledge the Phoenicians
appear to have been the first people to use it, but it is the alphabet which before long came into use throughout Syria and Palestine among other Semitic-speaking peoples beside the Phoenicians, and it is therefore known also by the more general name of the North Semitic alphabet. In this alphabet, for example, we have such documents as the ‘Gezer Calendar’, the oldest piece of Hebrew writing known to be extant, which dates from the time of David or thereabout (c. 1000 B.C.) and contains a list of farming operations month by month; and King Mesha’s Moabite Stone, which gives the Moabite version of the revolt mentioned in 2 Kings i. 1. I (c. 850 B.C.).
So far we have traced our alphabet back to the Phoenician alphabet of the eighteenth century B.C. without having to postulate missing links. When we come to consider how the alphabet arose, however, we have to exercise a certain degree of imagination.
The origin of writing long antedates the origin of the alphabet. Simple and convenient as alphabetic writing appears to us, it was at a comparatively late stage in the development of writing that the alphabetic principle made its appearance. In view of the apparent development of writing from drawing, this was inevitable. A picture of an old man, the sun, a bear or a bee, so long as it represents one or other of these objects and nothing else, remains a picture only. We might group the pictures together in such a way as to tell a story of a bear stealing an old man’s honey while he lay asleep in the sun, while the bees buzzed angrily but ineffectively around, but so long as the pictures denoted only these concrete objects they would be nothing more than pictograms. Such picture-writing is not unknown even in modern civilization; it is employed, for example, in advertisements such as those which by a picture-sequence show the wonderful change in a lady’s nervous system on washing-day after she has learned how to make a certain cleansing substance do the hard work for her; [See also D. Diringer, The Alphabet, p. 32.] it is employed, too, and very effectively, in such road-signs as those which indicate the proximity of cross-roads and other types of road junction. [Cf. F. Bodmer and L. Hogben, The Loom of Language (1943), p. 49.]
But if the picture of an old man is used to express old age, if the picture of the sun is used to express heat, if the picture of the bear is used to suggest a person or perhaps a nation characterized by some quality of bearishness, if the picture of a bee is used to suggest busy-ness (or honey), then we have moved a step—and a long step—in the direction of writing; the picture is no longer a pictogram but an ideogram, because it expresses some idea associated with the thing shown in the picture. Thus, in our system of traffic signs, a torch does not denote a literal torch, but the torch of learning, which by a further extension of meaning is (in this particular context) intended to indicate the presence of a school.
Or we may extend the use of our pictograms in another direction. We may use the picture of the sun to denote not ‘sun’ but ‘son’; the picture of a bear to express not the animal but the verb ‘to bear’; the picture of a bee to express the verb ‘to be’. If we do that, we are concentrating on the sound instead of the sense; we use the signs now not as pictograms but as phonograms.
But mark: pictograms and ideograms convey the same sense to readers whose languages may be widely different from each other, whereas phonograms are restricted to one particular language; for example, the use of the picture of the sun to denote the word ‘son’ is possible only with reference to a language in which the two words meaning respectively the chief heavenly luminary and one’s male offspring happen to have the same sound, as they have in English.
We have a few well-known ideograms which are common to most nations today, the most obvious being the signs for numbers. If I write ‘four’, only a reader who understands English will know what I mean; but if I write 4, my meaning is understood at once by any Frenchman, German, Russian, Palestinian Jew or any other reader who may see it. They will pronounce it differently—quart, vier, tchetyre, arba, and so on—but they will all understand the same idea by it, because it expresses an idea and not any particular sound.
I can go farther and build up words syllable by syllable, charade fashion, by the use of ideograms and phonograms. If I want to express ‘before’ in writing, I can use the picture of a bee followed by the ideogram 4. If I wish to write ‘sonship’ I can combine the pictures of the sun and a ship. This may seem a fantastic procedure to us, but it is exactly the way in which writing developed. The representation of every syllable by a distinct sign is a real advance on the earlier stage in which ideograms and logograms (signs denoting whole words) were the only available symbols. The number of possible syllables in any language, though large, is limited; with a syllabary, therefore (a set of signs denoting syllables), we are on the way to a more convenient system of writing. The number of signs in a syllabary can be further reduced if, instead of having a separate sign for every possible syllable, we have signs for only the simpler syllables, say of the vowel-plus-consonant or consonant-plus-vowel type, or even of the consonant-plus-vowel type only. Thus, instead of writing a word like ‘Manchester’ with three syllabic signs, Manchester, one could use simpler signs and write it Ma-an-che-es-te-er, or even Ma-na-che-se-te-re. The last effort looks queer, but it is the way in which Greek was written for long in the island of Cyprus, where a syllabary of fifty-four signs was in use, indicating open syllables (syllables ending in a vowel) only. Thus in this Cypriote script a king called Stasikypros has his name written Sa-ta-si-ku-po-ro-se.
In point of fact, it was seldom that one of these improvements was adopted in the ancient East to the complete exclusion of the earlier stages. Thus, in the cuneiform writing of the Euphrates Tigris valley and adjacent lands we find intermingled the simpler syllabic writing, the more complicated syllabic writing, and ideograms.
This script is called cuneiform or wedge-shaped from the shape of the signs which was the natural result of the instrument and material used for writing it—a metal stylus with bevelled head which traced marks in soft clay, which was then baked hard. The cuneiform script was first used by the Sumerians, an early population of Mesopotamia, for writing their language. It goes back to c. 3000 B.C. Around that time we find two distinct forms of writing in Mesopotamia and Elam, which lay to the eastthe semi-pictographic script of Elam and Jemdet Nasr (near Kish), and the proto-cuneiform of Ur and Lagash. Both were probably derived from a common pictographic origin, but the Sumerians made a more rapid advance from it than the Elamites did. From the Sumerians the cuneiform script was taken over by other peoples for other languages—Elamite, Akkadian, Hurrian, Hittite, and others.
There were other ideographic and syllabic scripts in use in the Middle East in the third and second millennia B.C.—the hieroglyphic script of Egypt, with the simpler systems derived from it; the hieroglyphic script used in the later Hittite kingdoms; the script printed †† on the Phaestus disc (which, though found in Crete, betrays an Anatolian origin); the varieties of linear script of Minoan Crete, which was carried thence to the Greek mainland and to Cyprus.
[†† Yes, printed with movable stamps! According to Sir Arthur Evans, the inscription was a religious chant in honour of the Antolian Goddess-Mother. It shows forty-five different signs. See Evans, Scripta Minoa, (1909), pp. 22 ff., 273 ff.; D. Diringer, The Alphabet (1947), pp. 78 f.]
[The Cretan linear script, which also goes back to a pictographic stage, remains undeciphered. When Sir A. Evans published Vol. I of his Scripta Minoa, in 1909, giving facsimiles of the inscriptions, he looked forward to their decipherment and translation in Vol. II; but Vol. II has never appeared. A recent attempt by the Czech Professor B. Hrozny to decipher the script has proved unconvincing. Yet the clue to the decipherment should now be within reach. In 1939 C. W. Blegen found about 600 tablets, written in a variation of Cretan linear script, on the site of Nestor’s city of Pylos in southwest Greece. The script seems to have been used for various languages, including Mycenean Greek. When the tablets have been published and studied (as they would have been by now but for the war), it should not take long to decipher those which used the script for a form of the Greek language. It was from the Cretan linear script that the Cypriote syllabary mentioned above was derived.
While these syllabaries were in official use in the great Middle East Empires of the second millennium B.C., the first experiments were being made in alphabetic writing. The Egyptian scribes, as
early as 3000 B.C., began to develop out of their hieroglyphic writing a sort of alphabet of twenty-four signs, representing all the consonants current in their language. These signs were in their origin the signs for roots which consisted of one strong consonant and one or two weak consonants which tended to be disregarded or dropped. The signs thus came in each case to designate the surviving strong consonant. They were only a potential alphabet, however; apart from serving to spell foreign words and to fulfill some grammatical functions, they were not generally used. This potential alphabet never became a real alphabet; it never became independent of the cumbersome hieroglyphic system but merely supplemented it where some such supplementary aid was required.
Yet it is commonly thought that the Egyptian potential alphabet gave the idea of a real alphabet to some of the Semitic peoples inhabiting the parts of Asia nearest to Egypt. This is not proved, but Egyptian derivation is less unlikely than derivation from any other source. We must remember, however, that it is not necessary to suppose that the alphabet must have evolved step by step from an earlier system of writing. The alphabetic idea, so simple once it has been suggested and worked out in practice, is the sort of idea that very possibly originated as a brain-wave in the creative mind of some inventive genius. ‘For this achievement,’ says Dr. Diringer, ‘simple as it now seems to us, the inventor, or the inventors are to be ranked among the greatest benefactors of mankind…. The more or less civilized peoples of Egypt, Mesopotaomia, Crete, Asia Minor, Indus Valley, China, Central America, reached an advanced stage in the history of writing, but could not get beyond the transitional stage. A few peoples (the ancient Cypriotes, the Japanese, and others) developed a syllabary. But only the Syro-Palestinian Semites produced a genius who created the alphabetic writing, from which have descended all past and present alphabets’. [The Alphabet, pp. 216 f.]
One point in favour of the Egyptian derivation of the North Semitic alphabet is that it lacks vowel signs. True, the Semitic languages are of such a nature that their written forms can dispense with vowel signs less inconveniently than many other languages; yet it is probably not a coincidence that the Egyptian potential alphabet was also vowelless. Other points of contact between Egyptian writing and the North Semitic alphabet are affinity in writing materials (though this is by itself quite inconclusive), and similarity in the form and direction of the characters.
If we wish to trace a closer connection between the Egyptian potential alphabet and the North Semitic alphabet, however, we must look for a missing link; the gap between the two is too wide for us to believe that the latter was an immediate development from the former. It has been argued in a very persuasive manner that the missing link is to be found in the script found in the Sinai Peninsula, at Serabit el-Khadem, where turquoise mines were worked on behalf of the Egyptians in the earlier part of the second millennium B.C. These Sinai inscriptions were discovered by flinders Petrie in 1905, and are now in the Cairo Museum. Sir Alan Gardiner, who was a pioneer in the decipherment of these inscriptions, assigned them to the period of the Twelfth Egyptian Dynasty (c. 1989-1776 B.C.), and concluded that this script was the origin of the North Semitic alphabet, largely on the ground that the names of the North Semitic letters designate the objects depicted by the Sinaitic symbols. A corollary of this is the view that each symbol indicates the initial sound of the name of the object which it depicts; for example, the North Semitic letter beth, which originally was the picture of a house and whose name means ‘house’, is the symbol for the sound b. This is what is called the acrophonic principle. It is difficult to account for all the letters of the original alphabet on this principle, but it does seem to have played a prominent part in the formation of the alphabet.
But the view that the Phoenician alphabet is descended from the Sinaitic script is likely to be modified or even given up as a result of Professor W. F. Albright's study of the Sinai inscriptions in the winter of 1947-8. Professor Albright now holds that the date of the inscriptions must be reduced by three or four centuries from the date assigned them by Sir Alan Gardiner, and considers the script ‘as normal alphabetic Canaanite from the early fifteenth century B.C.’
[Professor Albright’s account is given in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, April, 1948, pp. 6-22. His dating marks a return to that suggested by Flinders Petrie, Researches in Sinai (1906), pp. 129-131.]
In that case it is later than our earliest evidence for the North Semitic alphabet, and it looks as if the Sinai script and the North Semitic alphabet had a common ancestor. If we look for this common ancestor, we are confronted with the fact that in the period with which we are dealing Syria and Palestine formed the arena of a considerable number of competing experiments in alphabetic writing. The exact circumstances in which the alphabet originated, and the nature and extent of its dependence on an Egyptian prototype cannot be determined in our present state of knowledge.
The excavations at Tell ed-Duweir (identified with the Biblical Lachish), begun in 1933, provided further examples of early alphabetic writing, including an inscription on a dagger of the sixteenth century B.C., and four pieces of pottery of the thirteenth century B.C. bearing marks ‘which are unmistakably the letters of an alphabet’. [G. R. Driver, Semitic Writing, p. 101.]
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