Exodus 17:14

Write. This is the first mention in the Sacred Record of writing. Until recently it was not known how this was done and what kind of script was employed. The fact that alphabetic writing existed in the time of Moses was discovered about the time of the first world war. Previously, it had been known only that alphabetic script was used by the various peoples of Palestine, particularly the Phoenicians, in the first millennium B.C., and that European alphabets had developed, through the intermediate stages of Greek and Latin, from that original Phoenician script. Higher critics scoffed at the idea that Moses could have written the Pentateuch in Hebrew during the second millennium B.C., convinced as they were that Hebrew writing was nonexistent at that time. Those who admitted that Moses might have written part of the Pentateuch, or certain experiences such as this one, thought that he must have employed either Egyptian hieroglyphic script or Babylonian cuneiform.

According to the evidence it seems probable that the first alphabetic form of writing was invented — if not in Phoenicia or southern Palestine — in the very region of Sinai where Moses received the command to write the story of Amalek’s defeat in a book. In 1916 Dr. Alan Gardiner published his first attempt to decipher inscriptions found some ten years earlier by Sir Flinders Petrie which the Egyptian copper mines of the Wadi Magara on Sinai. Subsequent expeditions have increased the number of inscriptions from that place, and the combined labor of a number of outstanding linguists has succeeded in deciphering this previously unknown script. These inscriptions reveal the astonishing fact that they constitute the earliest attempts at composing a Semitic script, which consisted of about 25 characters.

The inventors of this alphabet were probably Canaanites who worked for the Egyptians in mines in Sinai. They may have had no written language of their own, but had become acquainted with the hieroglyphic system of writing used for centuries in Egypt. For example, the only way the Egyptians could express in writing the idea of a house was by drawing a hieroglyph, or picture, of a house. To some Canaanite at the mines came the brilliant idea of using certain Egyptian hieroglyphs to express abstract phonetic sounds instead of concrete objects. In the Canaanite language a house was a bayith. The first sound of bayith being b, they assigned the phonetic value of b to the Egyptian hieroglyph for “house.” The application of this principle made it possible for a small number of characters to express whatever they wished to say. This was an invention of far-reaching importance. Nor has it been greatly improved since then. We still use a modified form of the alphabetic script invented probably on the Sinai Peninsula before the Exodus. Our own letter b, for example, is a direct descendant of the first character used at Sinai for that sound.

The invention of alphabetic writing shortly before the Exodus was as much a providential gift of God as the invention of printing by movable type shortly before the Reformation. The Bible could never have become the “book of the people” if it had been necessary to write it in the complicated hieroglyphic or cuneiform systems which preceded the invention of alphabetic script. With this new script, with which Moses had probably become acquainted during his long sojourn in Sinai, it was easy to write the story of God’s dealings with His people and the various legal regulations found in the Pentateuch as well. It was also easy to learn to read such writing. By no mere accident the Hebrew Scriptures constitute the oldest and most complete historical record of the human race and of God’s attempts to rescue man from the kingdom of Satan.

In a book. The “book” in which Moses wrote the story of Amalek’s attack and defeat probably consisted of a papyrus scroll, the most common Egyptian writing material. Here, however, it seems to have been used to designate a metal vessel, made of gold to match the ark (see Heb. 9:4).

The pot of manna was laid up inside the ark (Heb. 9:4) in front of the two tables of stone.