Ancient Hebrew Language and Alphabet

Ancient Hebrew Language and Alphabet
Noah's descendants remained in the area known as
Mesopotamia 10 . Here man began to build the "Tower of
Babel". In order to cause the descendants of Noah to
scatter and fill the earth, God said, "let us go down, and
there confound their language, that they may not
understand one another's speech" 11 .
After the incident of the Tower of Babel, which occurred
around 4,000 BCE 12 , we find three major languages, each
very different and unrelated to each other 13 ; Egyptian,
Sumerian and Hebrew. The arrival of the Egyptian and
Sumerian languages seems to have mysteriously appeared
out of nowhere. It is interesting to note that while all three
have a very similar pictographic 14 form of writing, the
sounds for each of the letters are different, possibly
indicating the method which God used to confuse the
language of men.
As a result of the Tower of Babel man began to migrate in
three different directions from Mesopotamia, just as God
10 A Greek word meaning "between (meso) rivers (potamia)", the
land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
11 Genesis 11.7
12 Merrill F. Unger, "Tower of Babel," Unger's Bible Dictionary,
1977 ed.: 115. (BCE - Before the Common Era, equivalent to BC)
13 J.I. Packer, Merril C. Tenney, William White, Jr., Nelson's
Illustrated Encyclopedia of Bible Facts (Nashville: Thomas Nelson,
1995) 337; Unger, "Egypt," 288.
14 A word of Greek origin meaning picture-writing where a picture
represented a sound or combination of sounds. The Sumerian
pictographs evolved into the cuneiform (wedge-shaped) writing
familiar to most people.
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