I. When Hebrew was invented
Christians desire in earnest to follow our Lord and Master, our High Priest and Rabbi. We accomplish that by reading our bibles. Not every word of the collection of books in the bible are exactly the way Yah dictated. So our goal is to know the original instruction from the Almighty. We do not know His every desire for us in our lives in complete detail. But, we do know that Yah will not violate or go back on things He has already said and established in the written Bible.
There exists revelation and communion with Elohim. And the all of creation is declaring Yah’s glory, and He does not change. So, concerning His nature, what was true in the past is true today. He does reveal more, here a little and there a little, He winks at our sin, and allows a certain amount of foolishness, but He doesn’t change His Law/Nature.
Moses wrote the Torah in 1446 BC without being able to read a word of Hebrew. Moses spoke Akkadian, the Mesopotamian language from Sumer, as opposed to Hittite. Hebrew would not be invented for centuries later (at least 500 years after Moses). Even then, its only a liturgical language and not a natively spoken language. It didn’t become a spoken language until the 20th century AD.
The alphabet was invented by the Phoneticians and is often called Porto-Canaanite or Porto-Sinatic. The early Phonic Letters originated as Hieroglyphs in at least, 1600 BC. Referring to the Ancient Akkadian language and Phonetician Alphabet as “Paleo-Hebrew” is like calling Old-Germanic some kind of Paleo-American! Its not only dishonest, but shows very poor scholarship. The Phonetician Alphabet is also where the Greek alphabet comes from, so it would be equally correct/ridiculous to call it “Paleo-Greek”. ALL languages that use an individual symbol (Letter) to represent a sound, rather than a word (Hieroglyph) are called Phonetic, because it comes from “Phoenicia”, they have Phonics based writings systems.
Side note: The Phoenicians are Nephilim! Yes, we get the alphabet from the children of fallen angels.
The earliest record we have for Hebrew as a language is the Gezer Calendar….and its not even Hebrew! It’s Canaanite!!
Akkadian eventually evolved into an Aramaic form of Chaldean. Chaldean is often called “Hebrew” because Aramaic was the spoken language of Israel. If you had a copy of the very first Hebrew bible (The Ezra translation), you would have a translation, no different than a Chinese translation, or Nigerian translation. Eventually when Hebrew was invented and used by the Babylonian Pharisees, and in my opinion, the lawyers back then are the same way Jewish lawyers are today. They invented an esoteric language system (Hebrew) to lock up the Word Of Truth from the common man so that the peasants would have to rely on Lawyers and Priests to “advise” and “teach”, for a few nominal shekels, of course.
Distinction should be noted between “Hebrew” the language and “Hebrew” the bloodline, dating back to the grandson of Shem.
Bible puts distinction between “Hebrew” and “Israelite”
Now the Hebrews who had been with the Philistines before that time and who had gone up with them into the camp, even they also turned to be with the Israelites who were with Saul and Jonathan. ~1 Samuel 14:21
II. Translations Until the Christian Era
No book of the Bible was originally autographed in Hebrew –With the exception of, the uninspired book of Esther (Not Proto-Esther of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is really 2nd Ezdra). The way they are able to get around this inconvenient truth is by simply calling ALL Semitic languages “Hebrew” something or other. The language Moses spoke and wrote is an entirely different language than Hebrew. For example the word “Holy” or Quodesh in Hebrew is translated “set apart” where in the Akkadian tongue of Moses the literal translation is “Nose-ring”, the same ring put through the nasal septum of bulls to control them, it has been in use since the Sumer era. Hebrew is to the Semitic Language family like Ebonics is to English.
There are a number of theories out there claiming Hebrew is the oldest alphabet (Relics found in Egypt). My observation is twofold: 1. These claims are being made because the inscriptions are dialectics of our ancient Hebrew ancestors. But just by mere virtue of the fact that our Hebrew ancestors used a language and an alphabet doesn’t mean THEY invented the language OR the alphabet, why wouldn’t they just tell the story in their native tongue and with the known writing system? 2. Why would someone have a unique alphabet without a unique language? So, this alphabet was widely used, they are saying EVERYONE used this new alphabetical system invented by someone who doesn’t have a language? Well, its not that that would be impossible, but before we can make the claim that Hebrew is the original language, some dots have to be connected, just by merely saying something doesn’t make it true, no matter how academically scholarly they are.
Douglas Petrovich’s recent book The World’s Oldest Alphabet Is the go-to guy for “old Hebrew” theory. But I warn you, its not too convincing with all his leaps of faith.
Mosaic (ST) 1446 BC
We don’t have any original copies of the very manuscript written by Moses. But we do have writings in stone done by the children of Israel on Mt Sinai.
Naiothic (SNT) 1050 BC
Joshua was a gentile general and leader of Israel after the death of Moses. He was gentile in the sense that he was not born of Jacob (he was non-Semite), but he is ever bit Israel as any of the other 12 brothers. A future post on “who is Israel” will be coming. Suffice it to say, Israel is a Covenanted Nation; Those that sojourned with Israel and observed covenant Law ARE Israel; And those who disobeyed (even if blood descended from Jacob) were “Cut-off” and either killed or banished, either way they ARE NOT Israel.
Joshua is attributed as the author of the Book of Joshua, written in the same Akkadian language with the Phoenician alphabet that Moses used. But 441 years later, Samuel is believed to be the one who translated all 6 books (possibly others such as Job and Enoch) into Chaldean (Western Semitic) and added some textual portions, that is the anachronisms. At that time Samuel resided in a Community or School for prophets in the town Naioth. Hebrew is still not invented by this date.
Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) 623/610 BC
The Samaritan Pentateuch deserves a post all of its own. The Samaritans have a very rich and biblical history. They received a copy of the books of Moses from Josias in 623 BC, in the same language of Moses, and the same alphabetical system…exactly the way it left the hand of Moses! And they have preserved it to this day. The Samaritan bible only consists of the first five books of the Hebrew bible, and sometimes Joshua.
Through the millennium the Pharisees and elites have tried their best to get the Samaritans to change their copy of the bible, but they have refused. They have been bribed, murdered, tortured, oppressed but still, they have refused to change their text.
So would the SP be a good choice for the Torah? Absolutely. So, why hasn’t this information been shared at your assembly? Good question, perhaps the people in your assembly don’t know any better, many pew warmers have sat and listened for decades and still don’t know basic things about the origin of the book they proclaim. And, perhaps the ones that should know better are hirelings.
I would encourage you to download this pdf of Samaritan Pentateuch. It is paralleled with the corrupt masoretic text. It demonstrates how horrific the synagogue of Satan truly is.
Quattuordecim (XIV) 458-445 BC
Another short synopsis that deserves a whole post. But will try to do it justice at least to establish the translation evolution. Ezra is believed to have translated the Aramaic text into Classical (Square) Hebrew in 458 BC because he identifies himself as a “scribe of the Law” in the book of Ezra 7:12. He along with 13 other scribes, hence the name “Quattuordecim”, Latin for fourteen.
It is noteworthy to point out that Ezra or one of his scribe, did deliberately change the text to falsely make claims on four occasions. They are called the “Ezra Variants”.
After Daniel surrendered to Nebuchadnezzar in 605 BC at the beginning of the 70 year captivity and after the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC and after the decree of Cyrus to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple in 536 BC and after the decree of Artaxerxes II to rebuild the city walls in 458 BC the Hebrew world that Ezra the scribe found himself in had changed dramatically. Akkadian was functionally extinct among the general population of Israelite’s who now spoke Babylonian Aramaic. Ezra was one of a tiny minority who was bilingual and could still read and write in ancient Akkadian. To make matters worse, the Hebrew speaking Jews dropped the use of the Phoenician script and instead began spelling words out with the Aramaic alphabet.
It can be confusing when researching these language topics because scholars are not consistent. Chaldean is also Aramaic, and Syrian is Aramaic, but Chaldean and Syrian are entirely two different dialects. And to make matters worse, each have a half dozen sub-dialects that sometime overlap. And thats only 2 of the two dozen other languages that branch out like a porcupine. Linguistics and language families are very interesting and confusing. But to keep things simple, lets call the kind of Aramaic from Babylon in Ezra’s time period “Syriac”.
For the entire time the children of Israel was under the Babylonian Captivity (70 years) they had no copy of any part of what we call the Bible. In fact the Babylonian soldiers burnt all the copies of every manuscript when they took them as slaves. There was no man left alive who knew the Bible and so the Word of the living G-d was lost…well…er…so much for the magical “oral law”, eh? 4th Ezdra (Greek form of “Ezra”) it says Ezra channeled the bible into existence. I would use an expletive right here, but lets just say 4th Ezdra has been tested and failed. We know King Nebuchadnezzar had a copy in the royal library, because Daniel showed Cyrus were the bible mentions him by name. But I personally think Ezra just copied from the existent Samaritan Pentateuch. So, when Ezra returned to rebuild Jerusalem a copy of the bible was in his possession! But nobody could read it in the Chaldean writ. And as legend would have it, Ezra and the 13 scribes translated the Chaldean or original Akkadian into Classical Hebrew. And this translation is the source text used by all other manuscripts except for the corrupt Masoretic and the Samaritan Pentateuch.
Classical Hebrew was an unknown dialect by the peoples, we know this because of two passages.
1. “all who could listen with understanding” Neh 8:2-3 (The tiny remnant who could listen to the Hebrew reading and understand)
2. “translating to give the sense so that they understood the reading” Neh 8:8 (The general public who needed the Hebrew translated)
Septuagint (LXX) 282 BC
The first five books of the bible were translated into Greek, called the Septuagint (LXX). Its is likely translated from Ezra’s Quattuordecim. It was presented in 282 BC and was the “official bible” for 300 years in all the synagogues.
The Septuagint was the bible for the true church, those who were martyred. Not the “offical Church”, those who were doing the killings. The early writings of our Christian forerunners like Justin Marter, Origin, Polycarp
Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS)
Proto Masoretic
Masoretic (MT) 800-1100 AD