In the last article, we demonstrated that writing was prevalent at the time of Moses, not only by the elites but also by some of the general population. People wrote on stone, clay tablets, and papyrus. Which of these would Moses use? I am confident that he would choose papyrus. It is unlikely that he would care to fire clay tablets or drag around heavy stones during desert wanderings. But we might ask, “What language did he use?” In one sense this is an easy question. His audience were Abraham’s offspring. What language did Abraham speak?
Some might reflexively assert, “Hebrew of course. It is God’s perfect language that goes all the way back to Adam and Eve.” What is the evidence for this? All the names up to the time of Babel were Hebrew based. Unfortunately, this is a weak argument. It is fallacious to assume the name of a person identifies the language he/she speaks.
I’ll demonstrate with a modern example. General George Armstrong Custer is a famous figure in American history for his participation at the battle of Little Big Horn. Early in his career, he pursued a relationship with a Cheyenne teenager whose name was Monasetah (meaning spring grass). The Cheyenne at that time called him long hair in their language. One cannot conclude from this that his primary language was Cheyenne or that he even fluently spoke it.1
Another example comes from the Bible. Moses’s father-in-law had two names (Reuel2 – friend of god and Jethro3 -his excellence). The etymology of those names has nothing to do with the language he spoke. A final example concerns ancient Middle Eastern flood accounts.4 Noah (meaning rest or repose) is his biblical name. Utnapishtim (meaning favored of the gods or finder of life) is the flood hero of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Atrahasis (meaning exceedingly wise) is the name in an ancient Accadian document. The Eridu Genesis account uses Ziusudra (meaning Life of Distant Days). These names prove nothing about what language the survivor of the flood spoke.
So, what language did Abraham speak? To answer this let’s travel back four-thousand years. Abraham’s hometown was Ur of the Chaldeans,5 a region in Southern Iraq. The languages spoken there were Accadian and Sumerian. By 2000 BCE though, Sumerian had fallen out of favor, being mostly relegated to religious liturgies. For this reason, Abraham likely spoke Accadian. The Bible implies this to be true. Abraham’s grandson Jacob is called a wandering Aramean (Syrian in some translations).6 Accadian was spoken throughout that region in ancient times.
This does not imply that Moses spoke Accadian. Languages change over time. Old English is very different from the language we speak in the 21st century. Good luck trying to read a classic like Beowulf. The chart below7 pictures the evolution of the Semitic family of languages.
Accadian and Hebrew are related on the chart in that they both derive from the class of Proto-Semitic. It is unlikely that Moses could understand Accadian any more than Spanish speakers today can understand French without training and exposure.
Looking further down on the chart, notice that Hebrew and four other languages appear directly below the Canaanite branch (Ammonite, Edomite, Moabite, Phoenician). These were likely dialects which were mutually intelligible. There certainly were word/grammatical variations and strong regional accents present, but no significant communication barriers. The Bible indirectly confirms this in the book of Ruth. Naomi moved to Moab, later to return with her daughter-in-law Ruth. Ruth apparently had no problem speaking with Boaz. The same could be said for interactions between David and the surrounding peoples.
So then, what language did Moses speak? Sorry! It was not Hebrew. The Bible implies that Hebrew as we know it did not separate from the Canaanite branch till much later in history. Isaiah writes:
In that day, there will be five cities in the land of Egypt that speak the language of Canaan and swear to Yahweh of Armies. One will be called “The city of destruction.” (Isaiah 19:18).
Hebrew is not specifically designated as a separate language anywhere in the Old Testament. This separation is not mentioned until the time of Jesus.8 My conclusion: Moses spoke and wrote Canaanite.
Alphabetic Script
A final question to address in this article concerns how Moses would have communicated as he put his thoughts to papyrus. Language and writing are two separate issues. All of Europe uses the Latin alphabet. A flexible script is separate from the languages that use it.
Would Moses use the hieroglyphics of Egypt, cuneiform of Mesopotamia, or would he use an alphabetic script? As one brought up in royalty, he certainly was familiar with all three of these writing systems. To convey complex biblical ideas, both hieroglyphics and cuneiform require readers to be familiar with thousands of syllabic symbols. Even if this was possible, it was not practical. Inscribing hieroglyphics is a laborious task. An alphabet therefore is a better choice. But what alphabet was available?
It turns out that Semitic peoples very likely invented the first alphabet.9 They simply took twenty-seven hieroglyphic symbols or so (later reduced to twenty-two) and used the initial sound of the corresponding indigenous word which the symbol represents. For example, the hieroglyphic symbol for ox is
aleph . Therefore the ox symbol is the phonetic ah sound. The same thing was done to express all of the other Semitic phonemes. This gives us a system where readers only need to memorize a couple dozen symbols instead of thousands. This explains how the first alphabetic writing system came to be. The diagram below illustrate Semitic words that correspond to various hieroglyphic symbols.
The oldest confirmed alphabetic inscription we have (shown at the top of this article) is dated to about 1800 BCE. Unfortunately, different scholars suggest wildly different translations. A sampling follows:
Celeste Horner: “Lord of Peace Hallelujah! Rejoice, O Great Nations, Brothers of Egypt!”10
Eve Englebright: “Mercy, blow away the bad covering (of sand/sorrow), I pray; respond lest (I’m) buried.”11
David Petrovich, “Wine is more abundant than the daylight, than the baker, than a freeman”12
As you can see, these translations are completely different. Why? Confirmation bias and a great deal of guesswork. Scholars make assumptions as to which hieroglyphs are present and then try to match the sounds to find words that agree with their presuppositions. I’m confident that whoever wrote this ancient inscription knew what they were writing. The readers also understood. But for us almost four-thousand years later; good luck!
Despite this, the initial technique to pick hieroglyphic symbols to correspond to a couple dozen linguistic sounds was a major breakthrough. Of course, one expects refinements. The original symbols simplified and evolved over time. They were not standardized till many centuries later (12th or 11th century BCE), by the Phoenicians. At that time, the Israelites and surrounding nations conformed to their alphabetic symbols.
The first reliably translated example of an alphabetic script comes much earlier. It is inscribed on an ivory comb excavated from the city of Lachish dated to the middle bronze age (17th century BCE). It reads: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”13 Could Moses have used this script? Perhaps. Or maybe, another like it.
The picture below documents the gradual transformation from hieroglyphics to modern Hebrew.
To whom could we attribute the invention of the alphabet that Moses would have used. It had to be someone fluent in the language of Canaan and also familiar with hieroglyphics. An educated high-status Semite satisfies this requirement. Maybe, just maybe, it was either Joseph from the Bible or perhaps his sons Ephraim and Manasseh. This hypothesis is especially interesting considering that our modern Greek and Latin alphabet systems descend from this unlikely beginning. God’s sending his people down to Egypt then could be indirectly responsible for modern writing systems and all of the subsequent technological advances of civilization that this enables. That would be amazing, wouldn’t it?
Of course, we can’t prove any of this. No biblical or archaeological evidence exists to support the hypothesis. We do know that Lachish had significant cultural and political interactions with the Hyksos who ruled Egypt at that time, so I suppose that it is possible. However, it would also mean that Joseph entered Egypt in the 17th century BCE, which is a couple hundred years later than those holding for an early Exodus date would allow. What do you think?
In the next article, we’ll address the question: “When did the Exodus occur?” Stay tuned.
References
Miller, David Humphreys, “Echoes of the Little Bighorn.” American Heritage Magazine, 2 2(4), June 1971. With an epilogue by Robert M. Utley.
Exod 2:18; Num 10:29.
Exod 3:1; 4:18; 18:1-12.
Mesopotamian Gods and Kings, “Ziusudra / Utnapishtim / Atra Hasis / Noah Quotes From Texts, The Bible, etc.”
Acts 7:4.
Deut 26:5.
Aaron D. Rubin, “Where did Hebrew Come From?”
Luke 23:28; John 5:2; 19:13, 17; Acts 21:40; 22:2; 26:14; Rev 9:11; 16:16.
Christopher Rollston, “The Probable Inventors of the First Alphabet: Semites Functioning as rather High-Status Personnel in a Component of the Egyptian Apparatus,” (2010).
Celeste Horner, “Research Notes.”
Eve Englebright, “Alternate Hebrew Translations to Petrovich.”
James R. Hughes, “The world’s oldest alphabet: Evidence suggests it may have been developed by the Hebrews, not the Phoenicians, as believed.”
Daniel Vainstub et al., “A Canaanite’s Wish to Eradicate Lice on an Inscribed Ivory Comb from Lachish.”
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This is amazing information……it is profoundly thorough and it is incredible!
What thorough data about language and its use in different areas…. and how these languages fit in those areas…… and how they change!
Thanks for your hard work, Dan!
Dan, this is fantastic! Great summary of the linguistic history behind Torah.