Do we Know the Hebrew Alphabet?

How many consonants did Hebrew have?

This is a trick question. The answer depends on what you mean by a consonant: spoken or written. Today everybody knows we count 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. But everybody knows, and forgets, that it has 23 consonants: original sin is still with us. Sorry.

Writing is the only way we can learn what the ancients said, but writing is not language. And as writing reveals, it always conceals something of what it transmits.

There's no better example of this than the way writing masks the sounds of speech even as it immortalizes them. Since the 19th century, scholars have argued that there were actually 25 sounds in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic: it was long ago noted that the Septuagint distinguished original ghayin and kha in many place names and other transliterations. During the 80's, Richard Steiner first realized that there was an entire Aramean religious liturgy--really a kind of alternate-universe Hebrew Bible, including a pagan version of Psalm 20 with Baal instead of the Lord, and mourning for an Exile (with the Assyrians around, lots of people got exiled), transcribed into Demotic in Egypt, that distinguished these two consonants.

The Hebrew and Aramaic writing systems had concealed some of the most basic facts of Hebrew and Aramaic from us for almost 2,000 years. This has to do with their own histories--they're both derived from Phoenician, which lost those two sounds, along with original sin, sometime before the first Phoenician writing (11th century B.C.E., depending on what you mean by "Phoenician").

I stole the lousy sin joke from Richard Steiner, who has just published the definitive treatment of all these issues in the new Journal of Biblical Literature. The answer to the question of when, and how, Hebrew went from having 25 consonants to 23 holds lessons for us about the relationship between writing and language, as well as for when different parts of the Septuagint were created.

This is my idea of news, and as usual I got it from Jim Davila.