Tuesday, 8/19/14
In today’s reading Ezekiel inveighed against the principle
Phoenician port of Tyre. The Old Testament had nothing good to say about the
Phoenicians, but the Bible is indebted to Phoenicia for the language in which
their Bible was written.
I heard this story which dates back to 1200 B.C. . It gives great
credit to the Phoenicians. As the world’s leading traders they had frequent
need for the copper ore they found in the Sinai desert. The mine operator there had
constant need for reliable book keeping to keep track of tonnage and of days of
labor; and the only writing he knew
how to handle was the cumbersome Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Then, he was struck by the realization that every
spoken word is a compound of separate sounds. For instance, the word for a
gate, which was bab, was actually made up of three sounds: buh, ai, and buh.
Our genius decided on altering a pair of hieroglyphics. He
took the hieroglyphic for a house, which was two side-by-side boxes, like a
minimal two room house. He turned the boxes on end to make B. Then, he took the hieroglyphic for a goat with its horns
sticking up. It was called Alpha. Our man turned it upside down to stand on its
horns. That’s how he made the letter A
Going on from his alpha,
beta, he altered hieroglyphic figures to make the Delta which had been the
picture for the Nile’s delta. He used another hieroglyphic for the “ee” sound,
and so on.
The Hebrew
lettering for its Bible, and the Greek letters for its Classics were all
derived from that clever Phoenician’s innovation, which he called his alphabet.
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