Paleo Pictograph

[Gary]

Every linguist of any stature will tell you when languages move from a pictographic form to a “a,b,c” form they loose connection with the pictures. Meaning YHWH didn’t ask us to find secrets behind the letters. He gave us His Word in common human language, that we could read and understand. Beware of a translation that’s made by one person! Don’t be looking for hidden secret things, people have a tendency to add to or take away by doing such! That too is against Torah.

If you want a concept or book to be sold add the words, “Restored, Secret, Hidden, or Mystery.” It’ll be widely accepted and sell like hotcakes!

Folks that are trying to say that we can use these charts to find “New Meaning” in the text are wrong. For instance there is a chart like this in the beginning of Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammer which is credible. But Gesenius was not trying to tell you to find hidden meaning in the text.

There is no mystical meaning in the way they wrote 2,000 years ago before Moses was writing. All of a sudden the shape of letters comes up and now they have meanings? Carvings on a rock dated back in the 3500’s mean nothing when Moses lived in the 1400’s. Where did we get our alphabet, from Latin. Where did Latin get its alphabet, from The Phoenicians. Where did the Phoenicians start off at, from pictograph. So let’s get real, when you see an “M,” do you think water? I mean come on!

We have no business putting pictographic meaning into letters. Not even for illustration. It would be the same as if I wrote a letter to my mother, and addressed it “Dear Mom.” If someone else takes that letter and says “hmmm, we believe that the letter M comes from the Phoenician, and originally was the symbol for water, and we know that the O stood for cow, so when the writer addressed this letter “Dear Mom” what he was really saying is “Dear cow in water. This is not at all what I intended, and quite frankly, I’d be a little upset that people were calling my mom a cow.

Paleo Hebrew is simply a different font or way of writing the letters. It was used over a millennium before the Masoretes developed the vowels, so whatever may have been written in Paleo Hebrew had not vowels, just as the Aramaic square script, the shape of the letters that is more akin to the square script we see today in our printed books, had no vowels. For instance, the Dead Sea Scrolls (dated from the late 3rd or early 2nd Century BCE) do not have any written vowels. The diacritic marks (the nikkudot) developed by the Masoretes to indicate vowels, were not developed until the 5th century CE. So the claim that the Paleo preserves the original vowels is pure nonsense. Further, we have no biblical texts written in Paleo Hebrew that predate Qumran. And the Paleo Leviticus scroll written at Qumran is an anachronistic attempt by the Dead Sea Scrolls scribes to make it appear as though they had an ancient manuscript, but it was written by them as the parchment and ink, when analyzed, makes certain.

No true Hebrew scholar holds the pictographic symbols as valid evidence of True Scripture, let alone will they presume any meaning has now been favored as Truth.

The aleph did not represent an ox. There is not a single hint in any ancient Hebrew literature where they referred to this in the pictographic way. Aleph and Beit was just the sound “Buh”, they no longer looked at it and thought that looks like a house. And then as the letters were written over a period of years, they bore almost no resemblance to the original picture that would have been behind it. So it’s a complete myth. Again you can just as well import pictographic meaning into English, for example, so we could look at that ‘A’ that reminds us of an Oxen, and oxen work hard, so that is what it is at the beginning of the alphabet… It’s just nonsense.

Sorry folks, yes it’s entertaining, sure it’s interesting, but it’s not salvation and it doesn’t emulate Messiah. So call me ignorant and untrained but the scholars don’t honor it, neither do I. We can say The Shin represents teeth, that’s all well and good, but I don’t see teeth when I think of Shin. I think of Messiah and His simple Instructions and lessons.

To each their own, I’m sticking with what is proven by linguistics, valid Hebrew scholars and confirmed Torah teachings. With all due respect, enjoy the pretty pictographs.
Baruk HaShem – The Hebrew Hammer
AKA- Ashrei Ben Y’sreal(Gary Murphy)

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