Dr.Miles Jones and his The Writing Of God

So on the direct question "Moses invented alphabet" google fired back this jewel, not much cited elsewhere, and I feel obliged to add some pagerank to this guy.




Dr.Miles Jones, english teacher from Texas, published book under humble title "The Writing Of God" in early 2010.



He come up with the idea that decalog (10 commandments revealed on Mt.Sinai to Moses) has been written with first true alphabet, and alphabet was conveyed to mankind by mean of those stone tablets.


I wonder why Dr.Jones did not make one more step in his rationalisation, and did not suggest alphabet was actually inscribed on tablets, like this:



We use to see this clip-art drawing as a symbol, letters represent numbers, and numbers mean covenants, but may it be the actual, physical appearance of the tablets?

Moses used Proto-Sinaic script, not modern Hebrew (although there is another theory that modern Hebrew was introduced right at that event and for that purpose).
And all theological and moral enrichment "you shall not kill" was added to letters at the time they were presented to public.

I do not have personal opinion on the subject, for the lack of historian education, but story with Moses is Bronse Age, people, it is pretty damn old!

Exodus - 1300 BCE (by wikipedia)
Paleo-Hebrew alphabet - 1100 BCE (by wikipedia) ~ 10 generations later.

Thus, it does not sound unbelievable that event of alphabet creation was pencilled down later. Hey, it was designed for that purpose!

Here is another point. People of Exodus was illiterate slaves, and Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses Our Teacher), who was educated Egyptian (Dr.Freud opponents insists he was Jew educated in Egyptian family), needed to teach them some grammar before revealing inscriptions anyway.

So, without claiming absolute priority in inventing aleph-bet-dalet-etc. symbols, "Small Hypothesis" can be - Moses went up to Sinai mountain, and brought people of Israel an alphabet (which he either invented or learned before - but why it took 40 days if he knew it already?).

Pre-Exodus Hebrew inscriptions must be studied before applying any credit to this theory. Problem is - I seems like can not google up any.

Tables of covenants are also not found. Wiki said that oldest known Paleo-Hebrew inscription was Zayit Stone, and guess what is on it? Alphabet.



I mean people did carve alphabets on stones at that time, it is not a strange idea.

This one is 38lb, ~17 kilo, heavy enough to carry from mountain, even without adding explanation of what each letter mean.

Okay, back to Dr.Jones, there are few more interesting theories in his book, which I can not readily endorse, but will be very interested to discuss:
* Second covenant "do not have other gods before me" means "do not use other writing system". There is very interesting connotation between Polytheism and Hieroglyphic writing in this book, and using symbols instead of letters considered idolatry.
* whole book of Numbers is a course of calculus - this is good one! :-)
* Mt.Sinai is not on Sinai peninsula, but in Saudi Arabia. There is a movie THE EXODUS DECODED (with James Cameron, Avatar director) of 2006 on this subject. I only did not check yet how they agree on location.

I ordered book from his site, http://www.writingofgod.com/ will post some insider's view!

Radio recording on the site is also worth listening, including commercials!

Here is some educated commentary to the book.