ABR Associate Dr. Doug Petrovich was recently interviewed on Israel News Live to discuss his new book, The World’s Oldest Alphabet: Hebrew As The Language Of The Proto-Consonantal Script. In the one-hour interview, he reveals how he discovered that the pictographic letters of the early proto-consonantal script were actually evidence of the onset of a written form of the Hebrew language, whose pictographic letters derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The entire interview can be viewed here:
According to Dr. Petrovich’s translation, the earliest inscription, dating to 1842, includes the phrase, "Hebrews of Bethel, the beloved." Three of the other inscriptions are discussed in detail, and name three biblical people, including Asenath, the wife of Joseph (Gn 41:45), and Ahisamach, the father of one of the craftsmen who would build the Tabernacle (Ex 35:34). The most exciting inscription, however, may be the one which names Moses and dates to 1446 BC, the year of the Exodus. That inscription reads, "Our bound servitude had lingered, Moses then provoked astonishment."