The Jews are sometimes called the “People of the Book.” But another lasting contribution to human history may have been their early use of written symbols that represent sounds, not words.
There’s a superstitious prayer sung during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the high holidays surrounding the Jewish New Year. It asks that God “inscribe us in the Book of Good Life” — or, as my Reform prayerbook translates the Hebrew words sefer khayim tovim, “the Book of Lives Well Lived.” The image is that of the Lord as a divine accountant, and we beseech God to put our names of and those of our loved ones on the investment side of the coming year’s ledger, rather than in the dreaded Loss column.
I am convinced that this concept of the supernatural scribe is one of Judaism’s most lasting tropes. G’mar tov, “have a good inscription,” is the Hebrew greeting that Israelis and practicing Jews give each other on Yom Kippur, since “Happy Atoning” is kind of an oxymoron.
It’s not for nothing that Jews are considered the OG “People of the Book.” In my historical novel retelling the Exodus from the point of view of nonbiblical characters, basic universal literacy is a point of pride among the tribes and clans stuck working for Pharaoh in Egypt. One of my protagonists even becomes a scribe himself, so he can be in the tent where it happens when the commandments that are to bring his people’s factions together are debated.
The novel includes scenes in which children are taught their alef-bet — the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which eventually became the Greek alpha and beta. I totally made those episodes up, but there is solid research on the surprising extent of literacy in the ancient world. And recently, an archaeological find in northwestern Syria was published that pushed back the earliest birth date for alphabetic writing by at least five hundred years.
“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite,” says Glenn Schwartz, a Johns Hopkins professor of archaeology who excavated inscribed clay cylinders from a Syrian tomb dated to about 2400 BCE. “Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE. But our artifacts are older and from a different area on the map, suggesting the alphabet may have an entirely different origin story than we thought.”
Christopher Rollston, Professor of Biblical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at George Washington University, told Bible History Daily that he considers the seal inscriptions to be “a fledgling attempt in early alphabetic writing.” Some of the letters bear striking resemblances to later alphabetic inscriptions, while others “remain ambiguous,” according to the article. Although Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs are the oldest form of writing known to humanity, and cuneiform encoded several different Semitic languages, “the alphabet was [only] invented once,” says Rollston. “All subsequent attempts at alphabetic writing derive from the original alphabet.” It is even possible that the whole idea of creating symbols for the individual sounds of language, rather than pictograms for entire words, numbers or names, originated with the inhabitants of Canaan.
And while I was in synagogue over the High Holidays, I noticed that there is an alternative to calling ancient Jews the “children” of Israel. In some excerpts from the Hebrew Bible, they are called the “house” of Israel. “Israel” is an earned name of the patriarch Jacob, his prize for wrestling with an angel (Genesis 32:22–32), and it felt weird to me to call the elders of the community “children” all the time even if they were direct descendants of Jacob. So I came back from Temple at the beginning of October hoping that I could switch it up once in a while — but I would only do it if I could find a reference to the “house of Israel” in the books of Genesis or Exodus. Anything written later would be wrong, since that nomenclature definitely would have started hundreds of years after the latest possible date for the events that gave rise to the Exodus stories.
Unfortunately, the earliest reference to the “House of Israel” in the Hebrew Bible comes in Psalm 135, which mentions kingdoms in Canaan supposedly conquered by Joshua after Moses’s death. Since the dating of archaeological evidence found in the Holy Land for the destruction of Canaanite cities is controversial at best, and Psalm 135 treats all of that action as history, it’s too iffy for me to feel comfortable putting the words “house of Israel” into my protagonists’ mouths. My book ends before the Israelites conquer Canaan; I don’t want to be that anachronistic.
So all of the Israelites in my book are still “children,” which ultimately is okay because they were just learning their ABCs anyway.
