The Semitic Family of Languages.
In the days of the patriarch Abraham, whose father dwelt in “Ur of the Chaldees” (see Map, p. 105), about 2000 B.C., the Semitic dialects differed slightly, if at all. Recently separated from the primitive stock, they possessed the same roots, the same grammatical forms and inflections, and conspicuously agreed in regard to rules of order and construction.
The meagre vocabulary and other defects of the Hebrew are counterbalanced by its euphony, simplicity, and power of poetical expression. Conciseness is its crowning merit. A single sonorous word often conveys an idea that would require a clause of four or five words in English. The whole range of literature in other fields affords no such examples of majestic thought, grand imagery, and impetuous, heart-warming outpourings of soul, as the poetry of that sublime Hebrew tongue which was developed by a simple race of shepherds beneath the mild skies of western Asia.
Hebrew Shekel.Hebrew Shekel.
The Hebrew Alphabet.—The Hebrews early profited by the invention of their Phœnician kinsmen, borrowing from them an alphabet which, as may be seen on the opposite page, they changed little from the original. After the Captivity (588-536 B.C.), the more elegant square characters from the Aramaic took the place of the ancient letters; the latter, however, for reasons political as well as religious, were reproduced on the shekels coined during the period of Jewish independence under the Maccabees (168-37 B.C.), by which time the written language was universally expressed in Aramaic characters. (See Land’s “Hebrew Grammar.”)
The oldest Hebrew alphabet (see Table) contained no more than ten or twelve letters; the number was afterward increased to twenty-two—consonants all. These were qualified by vowel sounds, denoted by vowel-points
placed over or under the consonants to which they belonged. Capitals there were none.—While some have held that the names of the letters were given them arbitrarily, merely to facilitate the memorizing of the alphabet, others believe that a connection existed between their names and their forms: that, for example, A, called Aleph (ox), was originally a rough picture of an ox’s head; that B was the representation of a house or tent, such being the meaning of its name Beth, etc.
