If you wish to really impress me, I can make it very easy for you. Please post a Canaanite alphabtical book predating the Hebrew: you should have 100's - I ask for just one. Or any other language you wish. I think that is a reasonable request.
Here you go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet. You really need to improve your scholarship skills. Anyone could have found that in less than five minutes. It's actually an abjad, not a true alphabet, because it has no vowels. As I explained, they're not necessary in the Semitic languages (or any of the Afroasiatic family) because there's no such thing as two words that are the same except for the vowels.
The Aramaic abjad and the Greek alphabet were both derived from the Phoenician abjad. The Hebrew and Arabic abjads were derived from the Aramaic.
The Phoenician abjad was derived (indirectly) from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics--which were non-phonetic logograms like Chinese--but the phonetic abjad of later Egyptian writing was, in turn, inspired by the Phoenician. It appears that all phonetic alphabets, abjads and abugidas (a syllabary in which the symbol for the consonant is modified to show the vowel, rather than a separate symbol for every combination as in Japanese) except Korean are ultimately traceable to Egyptian writing, often by way of Phoenician. The Phoenicians were a widely-traveled people, just at the time when the Bronze Age was in full glory in Eurasia and civilizations were in need of a writing system. Even the Devanagari script appears to be an offshoot of the writing systems of Mesopotamia, although I haven't studied it enough to explain the details.
There was no problem of a census in the millions - how come?
They weren't doing fancy math with the census, just basic arithmetic. The Greeks managed to calculate pi, so with determination and plenty of time, such calculations can be done without a positional decimal system or a symbol for zero. But mathematics as we know it could not be developed until Fibonacci brought the Indo-Arabic system to Europe; the calculations were too cumbersome to do very many. And old habits die hard. Mathematicians immediately jumped on it, but it took almost two centuries before businessmen started using it for accounting.
The Hebrew [letters] are also numbers, yet you say I am confusing alphabets with numbers - that does not sound right.
I said you're confusing it with a numbering
system. The choice of symbols doesn't matter, it's how you organize them that makes the difference. The Hebrew, Greek and Roman numbering
systems do not have positional significance. In Roman numerals, a V is five, no matter where it appears in a numeral. In our system, the symbol "5" can stand for five, fifty, five hundred, or five decillion; or five tenths, five hundredths or five decillionths; depending on its
position in the numeral. And a positional numbering system doesn't work very well without a symbol for zero. They tried just leaving a blank space, but that was very unsatisfactory and easily misinterpreted. It doesn't matter whether you're using the Indo-Arabic symbols, letters of your alphabet, or new symbols you just made up for the purpose. It's the
organization that matters, not the particular symbols.
The Josephus documents, as well as some ancient Greek archives, say the Greeks got their alpha beta from the Hebrew alef bet.
No. They got it directly from the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians were great sailors and had a huge trading economy all over the Mediterranean. Everyone from the Egyptians to the Iberians traded with them and picked up bits of their culture. The Greeks had already developed their written language by the time they came in contact with the Jews.
Most European fostered links and encyclopedea say Phoenecian. I say, which ever one can prove an earlier hard copy wins.
Do your own homework. Examine the Phoenician abjad in Wikipedia and then compare it to the Hebrew abjad. Then you tell me which one looks like the ancestor of the Greek alphabet.
No dispute about commerce being a strong reason for inventing numbers. But this does not account for litrary, gramatical, alphabetical writings.The oldest alphabetical book I know of is the Hebrew bible - book meaning a continueing multi-page narrative.
Books are not always sturdily made so they don't survive. Besides, the early civilizations didn't do that much writing. After all, only a tiny percentage of their population could read and write. The more recent civilizations had more written works so more of them have been discovered. With the earlier writing systems we're often limited to inscriptions on stone. Sometimes there are clay tablets, but they're pretty fragile.
Consider that the Etruscans had a major civilization contemporaneously with Greece and Rome, and they had a written language. Yet so few examples of their writing have survived that we can't even figure out what family their language belonged to.
With regard Egypt, do I have to remind you, they did not have alphabetical books when the Israelites left - nor did they speak Hebrew - so how could the latter have derived from there? Fundamental factors must apply.
Read that entire article about the Phoenician abjad (although they call it an "alphabet"), it explains all of this.
You keep trying to make a shortcut. No one said that the Hebrew writing system was derived
directly from Egyptian. It is descended from Phoenician, which is descended from an earlier Proto-Canaanite abjad. As the article explains, that earlier set of symbols is clearly derived from Egyptian.
Have you checked the design of the letters? [the Japanese kana symbols]
You're talking to the wrong guy. I've studied Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Japanese. All of the
kana symbols are stylized forms of Chinese characters.
Not so. If you check a newspaper or traffic sign in Israel - no vowels are seen.
You're not paying attention. I already told you that in the Afroasiatic language family it is not
necessary to write vowels, because for any combination of consonants, there is only
one word. It's not like English, where bat, bait, bet, beet, bit, bite, boat, bought, but, bout and butte are all different words.
Today's English [should go] back to the Hebrew mode - making the vowels as alphabets again and discarding the Roman Latin - this should give some idea of the power of the Hebrew mode and what made English win all others.
I'm not even sure what you mean because I can't understand that sentence. You seem to keep interchanging the word "alphabet" and "letter," which is very confusing.
In any case, how much Hebrew have you studied? More than I have? I can read a little of it; on my own powers-of-three fluency scale I'm about a 3.5 in Hebrew. But you give me a page without the vowel markings (which are used for instruction and in the liturgy) and I'm lost.
It took us a long time to figure out the vowels in Ancient Egyptian words. It wasn't until linguists discovered that it's related to the Semitic languages, so they could reconstruct the vowels from its relatives, that we had any idea what it sounded like.
And these are languages in which vowels are not important! Imagine how hard it would be to read English, or any Indo-European language, if the vowels were missing or de-emphasized.
Whoa! If the Israelites were not exiled from Egypt, then you have to show that they never entered Canaan and had a sovereign kingdom there till 70 CE. You also have to explain an Egyptian stelle dated over 3000 years which mentions Israel by name and a war with it.
You're not very imaginative. Is slavery and exile the only way that members of one nation travel to another nation? Egyptian civilization went through many periods of prosperity, and Jewish migrants traveled there to find work. Duh?
Re the Flood. It appears you are looking at the Hebrew from a NT Disney like approach. Isaac was 37 years old when he was offered as a sacrifice - not a cute kid. One thing which is not fiction and 100% historical in the flood story is the first mention of Mount Ararat. Let me try to enlighten you. If you read carefully the flood report, you will see that it is limited to Noah's family and his possessions only [the text] - meaning his domestic animals only. You will not find a single wild animal listed there - only domestic animals - no tigers, snakes, spiders, aligators. This was a huge 'DOMESTIC' [Regional] flood, which this area was notable for. The phrases such as 'all the world and the mountain tops' were covered with water' - refers to how it appeared to the people in their space-time. So here we have a diminished or lacking of contemplation of the texts. The textual narratives are describing an early period of humanity - from their POV; it does not apply 5000 years later - meaning today. That was the then known world to those people and the text is speaking in the language of the people. The flood surely apeared as the end of the world - because that was their world - whereby most people never left their village throughout their lives.
I know at least twenty Christians who would call you a heretic and a blasphemer and start praying for your soul, for doubting their literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. They insist that all non-aquatic animals on the entire planet drowned and were repopulated from Noah's menagerie. There used to be one here; I don't remember his name so I don't know if he's still around. Probably not, we were not very kind to him because he kept breaking the forum rules and using the bible as evidence for his assertions.
Further, if you check the 'NAMES' listed in the geneologies, they are regarded absolutely authentic of its times, names being the primal premise for determining ancient history. Of note is those names are not Hebrew names - they list only one Hebrew name and this appears towards the very end of the geneology - namely Abraham's grandfather 'SHEM'. This is authentic because the Hebrew people never existed at Noah's time.
I'm not well-versed in biblical lore. When exactly was Noah's time? The Hebrew people differentiated from the Canaanites around 2000BCE, IIRC.
Nonetheless, we have to bear in mind that names are subject to fashion. You can't always expect the people who lived a thousand years ago to give their babies the same names that their descendants use today. Today there are Jews named Robert, Craig, Keith and Stewart.
Its not subjective at all. These great writers like Shakespeare and Milton uses phrases from the Hebrew bible as their punch line.
Of course they used them. But Shakespeare created far more figures of speech than he borrowed from biblical sources. He singlehandedly enriched our language.
