O alfabeto hebraico: origem divina x humana

Abstract

Writing is a fantastic system of human communication, one of the greatest achievements of mankind. The need of writing for human knowledge results from the fact that the oral tradition can be invaluable, but perhaps not enough to provide a permanent human knowledge or to register a story to perfection. Writing evolved slowly from ancient methods of communication, through a few stages of development, until present days as a collection of a small number of symbols, known as letters, representing sounds of human speech. The information on who created writing was lost in ancient times, when many people believed in the divine origin of writing. The history of the invention of the Hebrew alphabet is intertwined with the history of the invention of the alphabet itself. The Hebrew alphabet has, until the present day, the same number of letters in the same order, and with the same phonetic values that the primitive Semitic alphabets had for over three thousand years, while several other alphabets have changed. The objective of this paper is to discuss the origins of the amazing Hebrew alphabet.