Misquoting Moses with Joel Baden
Sep 4, 2026 · 55 min · 9 segments
If you open a Bible, the oldest thing in it should be on page one. Right? In the beginning? That is where it starts. Except the oldest words ever written in the entire Hebrew Bible are not in Genesis…
Joel BadenHost
Megan CraigHost
Before we get to the specific texts, there must be some firm boundaries somewhere.
I mean, we can very confidently say that somebody who never lived through the exile and didn't know what was going to happen didn't write a text that's clearly dependent on the context of the exile.
But what are even firmer boundaries? I mean, you can't write a text before language existed, written language anyways, right? And when we're talking about early biblical Hebrew, we're actually butting up pretty close to the borders of written language in human history, specifically alphabetic written language.
I know we don't like to date things on this podcast, but I think we can pretty confidently say there were no written texts before the invention of the alphabet.
It's cuneiform, right? From like the city of Ugarit in like the 14th century BCE.
And we have the beginnings of like what we think of as like regular alphabetic, non-cuneiform script.
Certainly, you know, as we're moving into the early Iron Age, 12th, 11th, 10th centuries BCE.
So cuneiform and alphabetic aren't necessarily, right? Ugaritic is cuneiform and alphabetic.
It's the little wedges that you see in like, you know, akkadian and sumerian and the um you know it's wedges in like in clay uh alphabetic script is like what we have today and we're actually when we talk about alphabetic script we're mostly talking about the ancestors of our alphabet right so we're talking about what like a proto what we call like proto-sinaitic right it comes out of egypt right so in egypt they've got hieroglyphs and they also start like writing alphabetically um you know like, with one sign for each, like, consonant, basically, is what we're talking about.
Whereas cuneiform script tended to be, like, syllabic as opposed to alphabetic, which is to say each sign represented, like, a consonant and a vowel, like ga or am or whatever.
Alphabetic script that we have, right, starts in Egypt, it seems, what we call proto-Sinaitic.
Basically, people like, we found it like scratched on like rocks in the Sinai desert.
And then eventually, right, like the big invention is the Phoenicians who really start like, whose alphabet becomes dispersed all over the place, becomes the Hebrew alphabet, becomes the Greek alphabet, right? There's a reason that we call it the alphabet, right, in English, right? It comes from Greek, where the first letters are alpha, beta, but in Hebrew, they're aleph and abate, and the signs are all related.
Before we get to the specific texts, there must be some firm boundaries somewhere.
I mean, we can very confidently say that somebody who never lived through the exile and didn't know what was going to happen didn't write a text that's clearly dependent on the context of the exile.
But what are even firmer boundaries? I mean, you can't write a text before language existed, written language anyways, right? And when we're talking about early biblical Hebrew, we're actually butting up pretty close to the borders of written language in human history, specifically alphabetic written language.
I know we don't like to date things on this podcast, but I think we can pretty confidently say there were no written texts before the invention of the alphabet.
It's cuneiform, right? From like the city of Ugarit in like the 14th century BCE.
And we have the beginnings of like what we think of as like regular alphabetic, non-cuneiform script.
Certainly, you know, as we're moving into the early Iron Age, 12th, 11th, 10th centuries BCE.
So cuneiform and alphabetic aren't necessarily, right? Ugaritic is cuneiform and alphabetic.
It's the little wedges that you see in like, you know, akkadian and sumerian and the um you know it's wedges in like in clay uh alphabetic script is like what we have today and we're actually when we talk about alphabetic script we're mostly talking about the ancestors of our alphabet right so we're talking about what like a proto what we call like proto-sinaitic right it comes out of egypt right so in egypt they've got hieroglyphs and they also start like writing alphabetically um you know like, with one sign for each, like, consonant, basically, is what we're talking about.
Whereas cuneiform script tended to be, like, syllabic as opposed to alphabetic, which is to say each sign represented, like, a consonant and a vowel, like ga or am or whatever.
Alphabetic script that we have, right, starts in Egypt, it seems, what we call proto-Sinaitic.
Basically, people like, we found it like scratched on like rocks in the Sinai desert.
And then eventually, right, like the big invention is the Phoenicians who really start like, whose alphabet becomes dispersed all over the place, becomes the Hebrew alphabet, becomes the Greek alphabet, right? There's a reason that we call it the alphabet, right, in English, right? It comes from Greek, where the first letters are alpha, beta, but in Hebrew, they're aleph and abate, and the signs are all related.
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