ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #15 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Is it realistic that Moses could have written the Pentateuch? I mean, had writing been invented? I know about the hieroglyphics of Egypt of course. But what about other written languages? Did they exist? What would Moses have used? Is it reasonable that Abraham could have known how to write? >> Nick, that's a very common question. I remember when I was serving a congregation, I was asked that question in Bible class. And I've been asked that question so many times over the years, I'm convinced that somewhere somehow people must be getting the idea that writing didn't exist by the time of Moses. But the truth is that writing had been in use for almost 2,000 years by the time of Moses. So the short answer to your question is yes, it's very reasonable to think that Moses could have written the Pentateuch just based on the fact that he would certainly have been able to write it. It wouldn't have been anything unusual at all. Now, literacy was not common. Don't get me wrong. Most people couldn't read or write in those days. But there were certainly people who could. There were trained classes of scribes and educated men. And Moses, you remember, was raised in the court of Pharaoh. He would well have certainly come into contact with writing and had been able to write. Maybe the thing to do here is to take just a few minutes and do a brief survey of some of the early forms of writing just so you can see that I'm not making this up. It's useful to actually see the evidence for yourself. And that gives us confidence when we say that we can be sure that Moses could have written the Pentateuch. So let's turn first to the oldest form of writing known to mankind. That comes to us from Mesopotamia, from that part of Mesopotamia that we call ancient Sumeria. Sumeria was the kingdom you recall before Babylon and Assyria and before the Akkadians, as well. The first written language comes from Sumeria from somewhere between 3500 and 3300 BC. Somewhere in that area. And comes to us from the city of Uruk in Sumeria. Now, Sumerian was a non-Semitic language. So this language was not directly connected to the language that was spoken by the patriarchs or the language that's recorded in the Bible. So let's take a look at a very early example of written Sumerian. Although, you might think this is a little too primitive to be called writing. What we have here in the slide is a picture of a Sumerian tablet. It comes from the time that we were talking about, perhaps 3000 BC or earlier than that. And this is one of the very early examples of writing. Notice first that it's not written in lines. That the tablet is marked off into rectangles or squares. And that in each of these rectangles we have a little picture of something. Something that looks maybe like an icon we would say today. And then some circles, some holes in the tablets and some lines drawn in the tablets. Well, what this is is a kind of inventory tablet, an economic document. It may have been materials that were stored in a warehouse. It may have been a receipt for a bill of sale. Or it may have been a kind of inventory tablet taken for the purposes of taxation. We really don't know. But we can tell what the tablet means. We have here pictures of different commodities. The one that's most easily visible is the one on the left that is a little jar with a pointed bottom. This is the kind of jar that was used to keep olive oil and wine in. And it was used to transport those things for sale, as well. And in the other pictures we have another one that's easily visible there. In the picture is a kind of sheaf of grain. And so we have, you know, again, a number of the little holes indicate a certain number like tens. And then the strokes indicate other numbers. And for each of these commodities we could tell how many there were in this inventory or how many had been sold. Now, Sumerian developed from this. And this I said is the oldest form of writing. And one would barely almost call it writing at this point. But it does illustrate the fact that people were keeping these kind of documents as early as 3500 BC or a little after that. The next stage in the development of writing comes with a language that we call Akkadian. Akkadian is old Babylonian or old Assyrian. It's the oldest surviving Semitic language. Here maybe we can take a look at the relationship between the Semitic languages as we were talking about in our last question. In the slide that you see now, we have a little chart that's divided up into four sections, two vertical and two horizontal. And they are labeled north and south and east and west. And this divides the table up into four groups: Northeast, northwest, southwest and southeast. And this is the way that most scholars today talk about Semitic languages. In the northeast box you'll see that northeastern Semitic is the language called Akkadian, which is Babylonian and Assyrian. So I have them in parentheses underneath. The northwest Semitic box is the one that's most important to us in the study of the Old Testament because Hebrew is a northwest Semitic language. Technically there are two language families in northwest Semitic. There's the Aramaic family and the Canaanite family. And then within the Canaanite family you have a number of dialects. Here I've got Ugaritic and Moabite and Hebrew listed. Because Hebrew is really very close to these other languages. When Abraham would have come to the land of Canaan, he would have been speaking a language that was basically identical with that of his neighbors. Much like say someone from Australia moving to the United States. He would have to make a few adjustments in the way he used words. But it's essentially the same language. And he would have had no trouble at all making the transition from one to the other. So then this is -- Akkadian then continues to grow and develop and is written in cuneiform. And cuneiform refers to the way language is written using shapes that are made with little triangles and little lines. These triangles and lines are made with an edge of a stylus made of reed. Something kind of akin to a chopstick except with a triangular end instead of circular. And so here we see an example of an early cuneiform Akkadian tablet. I'm going to zoom in on the upper corner of this tablet so that you can get a little closer look at the signs that are here. You see that they are all either little triangular indentions in the clay or they are lines. And the way they would do this is they would poke the end of the stylus into the clay to make the triangle. And then they would draw with the edge of the stylus to make the lines. In this way they could write little abstract shapes. And these abstract shapes are really modified versions of the icons like we saw on the earlier tablet. Now, writing in Akkadian was challenging because they had some 600 different symbols. Some 600 different glyphs as we call them technically speaking. Glyph is a technical term for a writing symbol, a letter we might say. Akkadian, however, was a very common language. It was used throughout the ancient near east -- I'm sorry; Akkadian was not a common language. But cuneiform was a common writing style used throughout the ancient near east. Akkadian was popular from about 3500 BC down to about 750 BC. It actually continued to be used rarely down roughly down to the time of Christ. But it fell out of use after 750 BC and gradually gave way over the centuries to a language called Aramaic, which is a much closer cousin to Hebrew than Akkadian is. One of the reasons that Akkadian has so many symbols or glyphs is that it isn't written with an alphabet. An alphabet uses one symbol for each sound. But Akkadian has a different symbol for each syllable, for each combination of consonants and vowels. So they would have one syllable to represent the sound la, another symbol to represent the sound lu and yet another symbol to represent the sound li. So here is an example. And this is just a little made-up example that I've prepared for you. And this isn't really -- well, it's real Akkadian. But it doesn't come from a tablet some place. This phrase that you see here written in Akkadian is -- we would translate -- read this something like li sha num ak di tum. So the first symbol represents the sound li. The next symbol the sound sha. The third symbol the sound num. And so for the phrase li sha num ak di tum simply means the Akkadian language, by the way. So this doesn't come from a tablet. We made this up. But it shows you the way the language works and why they had so many different symbols. Well, one of the things that makes translating Akkadian challenging or at least reading the tablets challenging for modern readers is there's some unusual things that happened with these symbols. Because Akkadian was used for such a long time over such a large area, the value of the symbols changed from place to place and time to time. This means that in different places you get a variety of symbols used for the same sound. We call this homophony, h o m o p h o n y. Homophony is having a variety of glyphs or symbols used to represent the same sound. So on your screen here we have six symbols. All six of these symbols represent the syllable ni, depending on where you are and when the tablet was written. That makes, you know, translating or at least reading the tablets a bit of a challenge. Also another characteristic that is connected to this is that if the symbols are changing their values, then one symbol can come to represent many different values, depending on where you are and when you are. So here we have one symbol. And this symbol represents the syllable ni. But it also represents the syllable na or the syllable li or la or zal or sal or dek or tek or thek, depending on where you are and when the tablet was written. Now, there are big books that contain these symbols. I suppose today there are computer programs that do this, as well, that tell us what value the symbol had at different places and at different times. And people who really do this for a living -- and I'm not one of them -- you know, they come to master this. And it wasn't so hard in the ancient world because afterall, a single scribe just lived in one place at one time. And so he had his set of values. It's a little more challenging for us today. But it was challenging enough for them even in the ancient world. So much for Akkadian and cuneiform. Let's move to Egypt now and look at the way that Egyptian language is written. Because in some ways Egyptian is a little closer to what we do today. Egyptian hieroglyphic, which is the name of the writing we call -- used in Egypt, hieroglyphic emerges between 2300 and 3000 BC, a little later than cuneiform writing for the Akkadians. Hieroglyphic is a pictographic script. That means that -- remember how on that tablet we had the little icons? Well, in Egyptian hieroglyphic, they never got beyond the stage of writing with the little icons. And the icons come to represent individual sounds or individual letters. So Egyptian hieroglyphic contains not 600 different symbols but about 2,000 different glyphs. Some of these glyphs or symbols or letters we would call them represent single consonants. Some represent consonant vowel combinations or syllables the way that they did in Akkadian. And so others represent whole words, single -- you know, one representing a whole word. And just to make things more interesting, sometimes a -- sometimes a symbol will represent a word and sometimes it will represent a single letter. And you have to sort of figure out how the symbol is being used at this particular time. Well, let's take a look at the way that Egyptian developed. And maybe we can learn something that will be of interest to us, as well, here. What you see on your screen at the moment is a picture of the very earliest example of Egyptian writing that we know of. It's called the Narmer Palette. The central image in the picture is an early Pharaoh by the name of Narmer. And you can see in the picture that he's -- it looks like he has his hand on the head of somebody. And he's holding a stick in his other hand. And there's some other things happening around him. If we were going to read this pallet, we would read it something like this: This pallet says Pharaoh Narmer defeated his Semitic enemy with the help of the god Horus. And you probably are looking at that thinking "Well, how did he get that out of that?" Let's take a look and see how this kind of writing worked. Here we're going to zoom in on the top edge of the tablet. And I realize you won't be able to see this very well. You can see that it's there. But you can't see the details because of the picture quality. But you'll have to take my word for it. There are two little symbols here at the top. One of them, the top one, is a catfish. And the word for catfish in Egyptian is nar. Beneath that is a little wood chisel. And the word for chisel or wood chisel in Egyptian is mer. So these two symbols together, nar mer, give us the name of the pharaoh preserved in this tablet. And that's the way Egyptian worked. The words -- the symbols I should say eventually get their meaning based on the word -- the sound of the word that they originally represented. And so we call this acrophonic when a letter or a symbol comes to have the sound associated with the word that it originally preserved. Now, this is very important for the way that the alphabet developed. So I wanted to mention that term acrophonic to you. But let's look at the rest of the Narmer Palette here. We had Narmer, the name at the top. Now, let's zoom in on a lower part of the tablet. Here we see that the pharaoh's hand is not actually on the head of this guy. But he's actually grabbing a ahold of the guy's hair, which obviously is a position of power. The guy is Semitic. We can tell that he's Semitic by his hairstyle and his beard. In Egyptian iconography or Egyptian art, this is a standard way that Semitic people were depicted. Other people groups were depicted in different ways. For example, the Assyrians are always pictured with long curly hair and kind of curly beards. Clearly different from the picture that we get here of this Semitic fellow. So that's how we know that Narmer was defeating a Semitic group. Now, let's zoom in on the upper right-hand part of the tablet. Here we see what looks like a hawk or a bird sitting on a plant. And beneath him is the head of another person. And the bird is holding onto a stick. And the stick is stuck in the nose of the other person. And the bird is pulling on the stick, which looks like it would be painful and, in fact, probably was. And here this bird is the symbol associated with the god Horus in Egyptian. So Horus here is helping to defeat the Semitic enemies in this picture. So we know that that's what's communicated by this part of the tablet. There's one other interesting thing on this tablet that's not part of the translation, if you were, but that's actually very important to us. So let's zoom in on the middle left part of the tablet here. And you can see a little man. This man is smaller than the pharaoh. And the size in Egyptian art, early Egyptian art at least, gives us the relative importance of the person. So the pharaoh is big. And this little guy is small. He's not that important compared to the pharaoh. But he is important to us. Because in his left hand he's holding two little plates that have brushes on them. And in his right hand he's holding a pot of paint. This guy is a scribe. And he is accompanying the pharaoh to write down the pharaoh's deeds. So he's got his pens, his brush pens, in one hand. And his pot of paint or ink in the other hand so that he can record the pharaoh's deeds. Now, here is why I wanted to mention that. You remember when we started talking about the Narmer Palette I told you that it was the oldest example of Egyptian writing that we have? And yet by the time of the Narmer Palette, there was apparently already a class of professional scribes in existence. Because this symbol here is commonly used in Egyptian art to represent not just a scribe but also the class of scribes. So we don't know what the scribe would have written. But we know that there were scribes who were writing something already before the Narmer Palette was written. So this is an intriguing clue to the fact that written language in Egypt is earlier than the Narmer Palette, even though we don't have anything earlier. And of course, the reason we don't have what this little scribe would have been writing is because he's writing with paint brushes on -- with paint or ink, he's not writing on a tablet of stone like the Narmer Palette. He's written on pa pie Russ or upon leather. And of course, papyrus and leather decay and go away. So whatever he was writing, writing down the deeds of Pharaoh Narmer, they have long disappeared from the historical record and we no longer have them. That's a tragedy because this tablet that we have here is the only thing that we know about Pharaoh Narmer. And if we had had the scribes' writings, we would know not only about Narmer but more about the way that Egyptian was written, as well. Well, before we wrap up with this one, let me just show you two other quick examples of ancient Egyptian just so you can see the way this looked as it developed later. And I'm sure you've seen examples of this before. But here on this slide we have on the left side a portion of an Egyptian monument. And you can see the symbols that are carved into the monument. And on the right side I've given you some examples. And these examples of the characters aren't necessarily the ones in this monument. But they are very common ones. And you can see what they look like and how they work. For example, the top one, this bird, represents the letter M or the sound ***eme. And it means something like as or by or with or from. So this symbol would be translated that way. Now, if you're very attentive, you will notice that the birds in the picture on the left are facing to the right. And the symbol example that I've given you is facing to the left. That's because when it comes to writing, the Egyptians are pretty flexible. Sometimes they write from left to right and sometimes they write from right to left. And sometimes they write from top to bottom. They never write from bottom to top so far as we've been able to tell. And you can tell which direction they are writing, at least on the left to right part, because of the way the symbol is facing. Now, some of the symbols are sort of bidirectional. They look the same no matter which way they are written. But some of them, like the birds, are pretty obviously facing one way or the other. So if you want to know which way Egyptian is written, you just look at the bird symbols. And whichever way the bird is facing, that's where you start reading. So on the example on the left you would start reading from right to left. Or technically in this case, this one is written from upper right to lower. So it's written from upper right to lower right and then in upper left to lower left. It's fairly common on monuments. Actually on some monuments in Egypt we have examples of writing where on the front side of the monument, it's written from right to left. And on the back side it's written from left to right. I don't know if Egyptians were right-handed or left-handed or right-eyed or left-eyed. There doesn't seem to be a particular pattern as to why they wrote one way or the other. But it is an interesting thing for us to know today. This is one last example. This is also Egyptian. But this is Egyptian written on papyrus. And I realize this is a little harder to see because the writing is a little smaller. But I just show it to you so you realize that even when they are writing with paint brushes on paper, papyrus or leather, they use basically the same symbols. They are just a little more -- we might describe them as a little more italic or a little more cursive like handwriting. Technically speaking, this kind of writing we call hieratic, which is really just the name we use for cursive handwriting written with paint brushes in Egypt instead of hieroglyphic, which is what's used when things are carved into stone. But it's essentially the same language and essentially the same writing. Just like your handwriting. It's a little different from the typing you see on a printed page. But they are the same thing. So we have that in ancient Egyptian, as well. >> So are you saying that Moses might have written the Pentateuch in Egyptian? >> I'm sorry; Nick, I didn't mean to give that impression. I certainly don't think that Moses wrote the Pentateuch in Egyptian. I just was trying to point out that Egyptian had been around for a long time as had Akkadian. So Moses could clearly have been able to write. But the real breakthrough in writing and the one that would have affected the way Moses would have written came when some unknown genius, one of the world's great benefactors, invented what we know today as the alphabet. Actually there may have been one -- more than one of these great geniuses. Because the alphabet appears to have been invented about the same time in two different places or at least we have two very early alphabetic scripts that are different. One is based on cuneiform writing. And it comes from the northern Levant, the region up around Ugarit. And the other is a consonantal script that's based on Egyptian hieroglyphics. And it comes from the southern Levant, Canaan or perhaps even from the Sinai peninsula. And it's the latter one that's of most interest to us. Because it's most directly the ancestor of Hebrew writing. But let's take a look briefly at first at the Ugaritic alphabet. This alphabet -- here is a picture of the alphabet on the slide on the screen. This is the whole of the alphabet. There are 30 symbols, 30 glyphs. That's a big improvement on 600. And although you wouldn't be able to tell this, the alphabet that we have here is almost identical to the alphabet that's used to write Hebrew. The symbols are different. But the alphabet order is almost the same. There's just a few minor changes. And the letters themselves are the same. That is what their sounds are the same. So we can tell that the language that was being written was very similar to biblical Hebrew, even though it looks different. It looks like cuneiform. But we're more interested actually in the other consonantal script, the one that came from the southern part of Canaan or perhaps from the Sinai peninsula. We typically call this script protoSemitic because our earliest examples come from the Sinai peninsula. Both of these alphabet scripts, by the way, are dated to somewhere around 1700 BC or a little earlier. Perhaps 2000 BC to 1700 BC. And they both seem to appear about the same time. So what that says about the sequence they were invented in or something is hard for us to say for sure. We just don't have enough examples to be definitive. But in any case, protoSemitic is important to us because this is the script that eventually came the alphabet for most of the Canaanite languages, including Hebrew as it was used in Israel. This script was borrowed by the Egyptians -- I'm sorry; excuse me. This script was borrowed by the Greeks and adapted for use in writing Greek. And then it was later borrowed from the Greeks by the Romans and was adapted to write Latin. And of course, we have borrowed it from the Romans and used it to write English in our various modern languages. So our alphabet is a direct ancestor of what you see on the screen now, this sample of the alphabetic script that we call protoSemitic. And I want to show you a couple of these just so that you can see the point that our modern alphabet is almost identical to these letters. Now, you look at it and say, "Well, that's hardly identical." But let's look at a couple more carefully. Here the first one in the list we want to look at is the letter M. It's about halfway down our list here. And if we look at the letter M close up, we can see that it's just a wavy line. The word -- or the letter comes from the word ***miuma, which means water. The Hebrew word, by the way, is ***mieme. And so again, the sound of the letter comes from the word associated with it. And we call that, again, acrophonic. That's the way that alphabets originally worked. So miuma or M is a little wavy line. And really it looks like a kind of simplified primitive version of our letter M. Just shorter. Fewer waves. Another one that is fairly obviously connected to a modern letter is just below that -- two more below that. The letter that's an apostrophe there that represents the letter in Hebrew known as ***iene, which is our word I, by the way, comes to us probably from the Arabic. This symbol looks like an eyeball. It's a little almost football shaped shape with a dot in it representing the center of the eye. Now, this one doesn't quite look like the modern letter. And until you recognize that in other forms of this, it's basically round. Unlike a football shape. It's basically round. And sometimes it's written with a little dot in the middle and sometimes it's not. So if you get one of these that's round and doesn't have the dot in the middle, it looks exactly like our letter O, which comes from it. Another one that's obviously connected to our modern letter is the last one on the list, which is a T. That's all we really need to say about it. It's a T. It's from the word ***tauwu, which means mark. Since the word tauwu begins with the sound ta, that's the sound we associate with this symbol, the T. By the way, interestingly this symbol sometimes gets rotated about 90 degrees in which case it looks like an X. This symbol has actually given rise to two different letters in our modern alphabet, the letter T and our letter X, which is basically just a T turned on its side. Some other letters also are closely related to modern letters but you have to know just a little bit more. So let's take a quick look at a couple of them. The fourth one down in the list is the letter associated with our modern letter H. Now, you look at this and say, "That symbol doesn't look a lot like an H." But if you rotate it 90 degrees, it does. This symbol is a fence. The word ***cautu means fence. So you can see there's an upper bar and a lower bar and a few vertical strokes in between it indicating the bars of the fence. But if you rotate it, then the two main ones become the two sides. And here you have three little strokes in the middle. But if you take two of them out so there's only one, you have our capital H. So you can see the relationship there. Right below that is another letter. This one looks like a bowl with two striped -- two little marks in it. This is the word ***kapu, meaning the palm of the hand. The -- our letter K, ka sound, is for kapu. And as you can see, it looks like someone holding their hand out just without a thumb. So you have four fingers of a hand. So if you turn this one sideways 90 degrees and take out the two center ones, you have our letter C. An of course, we use the letter C for the same sound ka that is preserved in the kapu word. Well, I could actually look at these all day long with you. But there's just two more I want to comment on because I think they are particularly interesting. The first one in the list is the letter ***olif in Hebrew. It comes from the word ***alpu, meaning objection. And this word or letter is actually the head of an oxen. This is where we get our letter A. Now, to see this you have to -- if you turn this 90 degrees to the right, you basically get the Greek letter olif. And if you rotate it another 90 degrees to the right, then you get it upside down, which is basically our capital A shape. In fact, there are some examples of this that look exactly like a modern A just turned upside down. One last one. I just can't resist talking about these. And that's the next to last one from the bottom. This is the word ***raish meaning head or ***raishu meaning head. It's where we get our letter R from. And of course, it looks like the head of a man in profile. And you say, "Well, how do we get our letter R from that?" Well, look at it closely. If you take this shape of a man and turn it around so that instead of facing left, it's facing to the right, you've got a little man facing right. Now, if you take the little dot out that represents his eye, then you've got a vertical stroke coming up and the circular part of the top of his head and then his little nose sticking down. And that's -- you know, if you simplify it just a bit, you've got our capital letter R. The back of the man's head -- the bowl at the top of the R being the top of his head. And then what we think of as the tail of the R, which is his little nose sticking down. So I bet you didn't know that the alphabet that you use every day goes all the way back to perhaps 2000 BC from the Sinai peninsula. Here is an example of one of our oldest samples of this writing. It's a little sphinx statue. And it's taken from a mine in the Sinai desert. And it was a little icon or idol used by the Egyptian miners. On one side it has the name of an Egyptian goddess. On the other side it has the name of a Canaanite goddess who we presume corresponded to the Egyptian goddess. They understood this to be the same goddess but with an Egyptian name and Canaanite name. Now, it's a little hard to see in this picture. But right along the bottom edge there is an inscription written in this protoSemitic script. So I'm going to cut away from this picture and look at a slide where we've traced the script. And actually in this slide there are three different examples of the same inscription that come from different images. The bigger one on the bottom is the way it appears here on this little sphinx statue. And then above it we have another one. And to the left yet another one. The one on the left is missing the first letter. So it's not exactly identical as the others. But close enough. Look at these three examples. The first thing that you might notice is although they say the same thing, the letters are all formed differently. Take the first letter in the bottom one and look up above. And you can see that the bottom example looks like it's kind of slipped down. It's kind of rotated about 45 degrees from the upper example. The second letter is sort of turned upside down from the upper example. And the opening is a little different. The third letter in the upper example has -- this is the ***ion letter, the O. The upper letter, has the eyeball in it and the lower example does not. Then we've got the next letter, which is the same as the first one again. It's about the same in both words. And then the last letter is the T letter. You can see the upper example is turned sideways like an X. And the lower example looks more like a T. Although, the bar is at the bottom so it looks like an upside down T. In the example on the left the first letter is missing. By the way, both of these are written from left to right. And they read LB ion, or O, LT. And so we translate this -- the first letter L is a preposition meaning to. And the rest of it is a name Baalot, Mrs. Baal, in effect. The T on the end is the feminine form. And the three letters in the middle is the same as the god Baal that we know from the Old Testament. So we would say this is -- this little sphinx was dedicated to Mrs. Baal, Baalot. The example on the left is missing the first preposition. What I wanted to show you here is the second letter from the top, which is that O letter, or ion letter, although here it's written not so much the shape of a football or an eye but it's written as a triangle with the dot in it. So here we have an example of three different handwritings, if you will. And this inscription is from about 1700 BC, about a little more than 200 years before -- 250 years before the time of Moses according to the traditional date. So this is an example of something pretty close to what Moses' handwriting would have looked like when he wrote the Pentateuch. Let's look at another example from later in biblical history. On this next slide we have a famous inscription known as the Gezer Calendar. This is an agricultural calendar. And it basically just says which plants were planted in which month. So we don't bother with the translation. But you can see the inscription looks sort of like protoSemitic. The forms have modified just a little bit. They become a little more regular in shape. And they are -- you can see there's quite a bit of repetition here because the phrase is the same in many of these lines. So there's a lot of repetition of the symbols here. This dates from about the tenth century, about the time of King David or King Solomon. So this is an example of what David or Solomon's handwriting would have looked like. The last example I'd like to show you comes from about the year 700, around the time of King Hezekiah or just a little after the time of the prophet Isaiah. This is an inscription that's found on a tunnel in the city of Jerusalem. The building of this tunnel is recorded in the Bible in II Kings Chapter 20 verse 20. We're told that Hezekiah had this tunnel dug in order to provide water for the city during the time of siege or in preparation for the time of siege. So it's called the Siloam Tunnel. And this is the Siloam Tunnel inscription. This inscription looks a little more cursive than the last one that we saw. But again, they are recognizably the same symbols as were found in protoSemitic just having evolved a little bit becoming a little more regular as time has gone on. In this case, you can just about see in the second line three examples of the L character that we saw on that inscription from Sinai, from the sphinx. Although, they stick up above the lines. So you can see them. The interesting thing is that all three of them -- actually there are four of them in the line. All four of them are almost identical. And they are all upside down from the way that we saw them in the older inscription. So between 1700 BC and 700 BC, a thousand years later, this character has rotated 180 degrees. And it's become standard. Because all of the examples in this inscription are written in the same way. Kind of an upside down example from the earlier one. This would have been handwriting from roughly say the time of Isaiah or thereabouts. So here I've shown you some examples of Hebrew handwriting, the oldest of which predates Moses. The language in each case is Hebrew. And a slightly earlier stage than the Hebrew of the Bible. But not very much different at all. If you can read biblical Hebrew, you can read each of these. Although, you might have to get used to reading the different handwriting. So I hope you can see, Nick, that it's very clear that Moses would have been able to write. And this is the kind of thing that he would have been writing. He would have been writing an ancestor of biblical Hebrew using a script that is very similar to that which we call protoSemitic. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***