The Hebrew Scriptures give evidence that Israel made use of written
records before the composition of the canonical Bible. References to the
_Book of the Wars of the Lord_, and the _Book of Jasher_, appear in the
Pentateuch and Joshua (Num. 21:14; Josh. 10:13). While the events which
they commemorate may have first been passed on by word of mouth, the
word "book" (_sepher_, inscription, written document) implies that they
also were recorded in written documents. By the time of the Judges, a
lad whom Gideon happened to meet along the road was able to write the
names of twenty-seven men who were the elders of Succoth (Judg. 8:14).
The discovery of the Amarna Tablets created considerable interest in the
matter of writing in ancient Canaan, and among the Israelites. Early in
the twentieth century, Edouard Naville of the University of Geneva
argued that the earliest documents of the Old Testament were written "in
the idiom and with the characters of the Tel-el-Amarna tablets, namely
Babylonian cuneiform," or Akkadian as we call it today.[63]
Naville went so far as to suggest that the Akkadian documents which lie
behind our Hebrew Old Testament (or at least the Pentateuch and Joshua)
were in use until the time of Ezra who adapted them to the alphabet used
by the Aramaic speaking Jews of the Persian Empire. This view is not
seriously considered today, for we know that Early or Palaeo-Hebrew
manuscripts antedate the Square or Aramaic form of the letters in
current use. The Canaanite dialect in use at Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit,
was written in a cuneiform alphabet at a time contemporary with the
Amarna texts. Another group of texts, dated about 1500 B.C., was
discovered at the Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai Peninsula. There
are about twenty-five inscriptions in all, written in a form of
alphabetic writing which was clearly derived from Egyptian
hieroglyphics. Three short examples of the same alphabet, dating
somewhat earlier than the Sinai inscriptions, have been discovered at
Gezer, Lachish, and Shechem in southern Canaan. The oldest actual Hebrew
inscription, using the Paleao-Hebrew script, is the Gezer Calendar
(_ca._ 900 B.C.).
We cannot know for certain the nature of the writing on the tables, or
tablets of the Law (Exod. 34:27-28). Moses, raised as an Egyptian
prince, probably knew both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Akkadian cuneiform,
and he may have learned to write in an early form of the Hebrew alphabet
as a result of contacts with his own people. The Amarna texts have
underscored the fact that both Egypt and Canaan were highly literate
during the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries before Christ.