public monuments in the beginning of the ninth and in the second half of the eighth century B.C., is to be seen in the inscription of Mêšaʿ, as well as in that of Siloam. The characters on the Maccabaean coins of the second century B.C., and also on ancient gems, still bear much resemblance to this (cf. § 2 d). With the Old Hebrew writing the Phoenician is nearly identical (see § 1 k, § 2 f, and the Table of Alphabets). From the analogy of the history of other kinds of writing, it may be assumed that out of and along with this monumental character, a less antique and in some ways more convenient, rounded style was early developed, for use on softer materials, skins, bark, papyrus, and the like. This the Samaritans retained after their separation from the Jews, while the Jews gradually[1] (between the sixth and the fourth century) exchanged it for an Aramaic character. From this gradually arose (from about the fourth to the middle of the third century) what is called the square character, which consequently bears great resemblance to the extant forms of Aramaic writing, such as the Egyptian-Aramaic, the Nabatean and especially the Palmyrene. Of Hebrew inscriptions in the older square character, that of ʿArâq al-Emîr (15½ miles north-east of the mouth of the Jordan) probably belongs to 183 B.C.[2]
The Jewish sarcophagus-inscriptions of the time of Christ, found in Jerusalem in 1905, almost without exception exhibit a pure square character. This altered little in the course of centuries, so that the age of a Hebrew MS. cannot easily be determined from the style of the writing. The oldest known biblical fragment is the Nash papyrus (found in 1902), containing the ten commandments and the beginning of Dt 6, of the end of the first or beginning of the second century A.D.; cf. N. Peters, Die älteste Abschr. der 10 Gebote, Freibg. i. B. 1905. Of actual MSS. of the Bible the oldest is probably one of 820–850 A.D. described by Ginsburg, Introd., p. 469 ff., at the head of his sixty principal MSS.; next in age is the codex of Moses ben Asher at Cairo (897 A.D., cf. the art. ‘Scribes’ in the Jew. Encycl. xi and Gottheil in JQR. 1905, p. 32). The date (916 A.D.) of the Codex prophetarum Babylon. Petropol. (see § 8 g, note) is quite certain.—In the synagogue-rolls a distinction is drawn between the Tam-character (said to be so called from Rabbi Tam, grandson of R. Yiṣḥāqî, in the twelfth century) with its straight strokes, square corners and ‘tittles’ (tāgîn), in German and Polish MSS., and the foreign character with rounded letters and tittles in Spanish MSS. See further E. König, Einl. in das A.T., Bonn, 1893, p. 16 ff.
- ↑ On the effect of the transitional mixture of earlier and later forms on the constitution of the text, see R. Kittel, Ueber d. Notwendigk. d. Herausg. einer neuen hebr. Bibel, Lpz. 1901, p. 20 ff.—L. Blau, ‘Wie lange stand die althebr. Schrift bet den Juden im Gebrauch?’ in Kaufmanngedenkbuch, Breslau, 1900, p. 44 ff.
- ↑ Not 176, as formerly held. Driver and Lidzbarski now read ערביה, correctly, not טוביה.
