130 The Testimony, April 2004 lessons can be based on things relating to the Likewise there are great rocks along the way physical world. where we may find shade from the heat of the Our life in this age is a journey through a sun, and springs of water welling up to the sur- spiritual wilderness while we set our vision face where we may rest awhile to be refreshed. ahead, looking for “the city which has founda- So it is on the spiritual level that we can benefit tions, whose builder and maker is God” (Heb. from attending Bible classes and other ecclesial 11:10, NKJV; cf. 13:14). meetings, as well as being a help to others who The scorching rays of the sun that we experi- are travelling with us. ence in this spiritual desert are the tribulations However, our journey through the wilderness and difficulties that test our faith and help us to does have its perils, particularly if we do not develop characters pleasing to our heavenly Fa- keep up with our brethren and sisters but allow ther (Mt. 13:5,6,20,21; Lk. 8:13). If we fail to tap ourselves to become spiritual stragglers. The into the water of life that is provided we will be spiritual counterpart of Amalek is the power of spiritually unfruitful. That water is available sin that lies in wait to trap the unwary traveller daily in the form of the Word of God, and we and at the same time seeks to steal away the neglect it at our peril. If we do tap into that water of life by replacing the Word of God with water of life we can grow into upright trees of the wisdom of this world. Our heavenly Father righteousness that produce much fruit to the has war on sin “from generation to generation” glory of our heavenly Father. and will “utterly put out the remembrance of In addition, there are oases provided where Amalek [sin] from under heaven” (Ex. 17:16,14). we can find spiritual food, shade and rest after a “A man shall be as an hiding place from the hard week of travel. There we are able to meet wind, and a covert [shelter] from the tempest; as other pilgrims heading for the same city and rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a have the opportunity to encourage one another great rock in a weary land” (Isa. 32:2). So the to continue our journey with determination. Let Lord Jesus is to us as we journey towards the us not neglect to meet together weekly to re- Kingdom of God. member our absent Lord. (Concluded) The alphabets of the Bible: Greek John Carder OME HISTORIANS and archaeologists and Phoenicians are mentioned in the records of theorise that the Phoenicians or the Ca- Solomon’s overseas ventures. Snaanites invented the Semitic alphabet and The earliest Greek records known to us are taught it first to the Hebrews and then spread also lists of goods and cargoes and of palace it to the Greeks. But there is no evidence that treasures. They were in a variety of scripts, some the Canaanites had an alphabetic script or that still not fully deciphered. The Greek alphabet the Phoenicians developed a literature. No scrolls still in use today was adopted in Attica, with its or books have survived in mainland Phoenicia capital Athens, when that city-state became domi- or in its empire, which stretched to Carthage nant. This was at the beginning of the ‘Classical’ and beyond. There are some Phoenician com- period, when many still-famous dramatists and mercial records, lists of goods and cargoes, and philosophers flourished. The start of that period a very few inscriptions on royal tombs of a late roughly coincided with the return of the Jews date. from exile, that is, about 500 B.C. I believe that alphabetical writing was devel- oped for recording the Scriptures, and that the Hebrew and Greek Phoenicians borrowed the Hebrew alphabet The very word ‘alphabet’ is Greek, but betrays mainly for their trading purposes and spread it its connection with Hebrew, comprising the first around the ports of the Mediterranean. Many of two letters in both languages. Indeed, the first the people they traded with were Greek. The four letters in each language show the connec- Hebrews were not great sailors in the early days, tion: The Testimony, April 2004 131 Greek Hebrew Greek Hebrew Before After exile exile 1 60 2 70 3 80 4 90 5 100 6 200 7 300 400 8 500 9 600 10 700 20 800 30 900 40 1,000 50 Hebrew: aleph, bet, gimel, dalet (A, B, G, D) direction then turns round and goes back beside Greek: alpha, beta, gamma, delta (A, B, G, D). the first. Not only that, in the right-to-left lines The big difference was that the Greeks modified the letters themselves were written back-to-front, some letters, and they made some extra ones, to so that alternate lines were mirror images. How- introduce the vowels, A, E, I, O, U, into their ever, the Greeks fairly soon dropped that sys- alphabet. tem and settled for writing from left to right, as We have noted in the article about Hebrew we still do. (Mar. 2004, p. 98) that the Hebrew alphabet con- In both Hebrew and Greek the letters are sisted entirely of consonants. The first letter in sounded as indicated by their names: bet and the Hebrew, aleph, was and is a consonant. It is beta are ‘b’ sounds, gimel and gamma are ‘g’ in itself silent but can take any vowel sound. It is sounds, and so on. The chart shows the Hebrew not simply a letter A, but its Greek equivalent, and Greek alphabets side by side along with alpha, is an A and nothing else. The adaptations the numbers represented by the respective let- by the Greeks to fit vowels into the Hebrew ters. First we may note how the shapes of the system and to adjust the numerical values were Greek letters resemble the pre-Exilic Hebrew very ingenious, as we shall see. letters rather than the present printed forms. In We should first of all note that, unlike He- many cases the resemblances are clear. In some brew, Greek has both capital and small letters. cases a little imagination is needed, involving a The chart above shows only the capital letters slight rotation or simplification of the original because the earliest Greek manuscripts were writ- symbol. We should also remember that we are ten entirely in capitals, especially the Biblical comparing handwritten letters with printed manuscripts. At first, Greek was written in a forms. way more difficult even than Hebrew. One line was written from right to left, the next from left The alphabets compared to right, and the next line reverted to right to left In this section we go into more detail about the again. Boustrophedon was the name of that sys- Greek alphabet and its links with Hebrew. It tem, meaning ‘as an ox turns in ploughing’ (in will be necessary to refer to the chart for this. those days), that is, it draws a furrow in one This section is more likely to be of interest to 132 The Testimony, April 2004 students who use concordances and lexicons to numerical value 90, was dropped down the look up original words, and some readers may Greek alphabet and promoted to 900, as we shall wish to skip this part of the article. see later. The Greeks turned the very first letter into a The Greek sign koppa, value 90, was derived vowel, the ‘a’ sound, and changed the fifth let- from the Hebrew kof, value 100. The koppa was ter, the Hebrew H, into a short E. Greek does dropped early as a letter from the Greek alpha- have an ‘h’ sound but it is shown like an in- bet but, like the di-gamma, mentioned above, re- verted comma above the initial letters of words mained a number symbol. and is called a ‘rough breathing’. Usually it comes The letter R, rho in Greek, is number 100, but over an initial vowel, as in the word ho (one of resh in Hebrew is 200. The letter S, sigma in Greek, the seventeen forms of the word ‘the’ in Greek). is number 200 while shin is 300 in Hebrew. The The rough breathing is also associated with an Hebrew letter can have the compound sound initial ‘r’. That is why we have spellings such as ‘sh’ or a plain ‘s’, but sigma has simply an ‘s’ ‘rhythm’ and ‘rhododendron’, which are words sound. derived from Greek. There is also another sym- When we come to the letter ‘t’, in Greek tau, bol, called a ‘smooth breathing’, to show where value 300, and in Hebrew tav, value 400, we no ‘h’ sound is intended. reach the end of the Hebrew alphabet and come Next comes another complication, the sixth to five extra letters added by the Greeks. letter, di-gamma, sounded as an ‘f’ or ‘v’. It is The first additional Greek letter is upsilon, the derived from the Hebrew vav, but was dropped vowel U, value 400. The second, phi, is an ‘f’ from the Greek alphabet in early times, though sound. As mentioned above, the Greeks made not from the numeric system based on the al- two separate symbols, pi and phi, in place of the phabet, being the number six.