ABSTRACT
The Hebrew writing system has a long and fascinating history that can be traced to the beginning of second millennium BCE. It is likely to derive ultimately from Egyptian hieroglyphs, in which a single word could be represented by a naturalistic picture. The creators of the Hebrew writing system, which is called Proto-Sinaitic, started to use their simplified hieroglyphs not to indicate individual words but rather to denote the first consonant of the word that each hieroglyph had represented. The Proto-Sinaitic consonantal alphabet is thought to have spread through Canaan and to have been adopted by the speakers of various Semitic languages, where it developed into several variants. One such variant was Phoenician alphabet, which in turn evolved into the early Hebrew alphabet, called Paleo-Hebrew. Learning to write Biblical Hebrew is very straightforward. The chapter explores the slightly simplified forms of the block consonants conventionally used in handwriting.
