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By John Tvedtnes

One of the things that have fascinated me over the years came to my attention about 1969-70. This is the use of Egyptian characters to write Hebrew and related texts. Hebrew is part of the language family called Northwest Semitic. Actually, Hebrew, Canaanite, Phoenician, Moabite, Edomite, and Ammonite are all basically the same language with dialectical differences, such as using a different accent, or somewhat different words. The Canaanite languages are the same as Hebrew, written in the same alphabet. Canaanites and Israelites could talk to each other. In Mormon 9:32-34, we have the statement by Moroni about using reformed Egyptian, and he also says that they also knew Hebrew. In 1 Nephi 1:2, Nephi says “I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.” This always made me think that actually what we have here is probably a combination of things. We might have Hebrew written in Egyptian characters. Or, that we might have a mixture of the two. As it turns out, all of these are possibilities.

Egyptian actually had three different writing systems, each distinguished by the names given them in Greek. The first, which you have all undoubtedly seen, is hieroglyphics, which are the sacred writing using drawings of birds, animals, and humans and various body parts, furniture, and things found in nature. They used this mostly for engraving on stone, although you will find it written on parchment and papyrus, also.

The second is a cursive form called hieratic, which means “sacred.” Hieratic is a lot like the hieroglyphic, but is a faster way of writing things, so some things might be obscured in our day if we don't study both systems.

An even more common abbreviated form of Egyptian writing is called demotic, meaning “popular.” This came into use about 800 B.C. So, it had already been in use for about 200 years before Lehi's time.

By the way, all of the ancient texts written in Israel, whether Jewish or Israelite in the north, used Egyptian characters for numerals. Although the Hebrew alphabet has 22 characters, when they wrote numerals they used the Egyptian characters. This has been known from as early as the 9th century BC. What's more surprising is that there are, in fact, texts that have been found that are in Hebrew or a related language that are written in Egyptian characters and not in Hebrew characters. Let me illustrate this way: I can write a Hebrew word in English so that you would recognize it but it's not the way they would write it in Israel. If I were to write shalom (meaning “peace”) in Hebrew, I'd use the Hebrew letters. The English letters don't belong in the Hebrew alphabet but we can still use them to represent Hebrew words.

The same is true of texts using Egyptian characters representing Hebrew words. For example, there is the London Magical Papyrus of the 14th century BC, found in Egypt; and the Harris Magical Papyrus found in the next century B.C.; Papyrus Anastasia I, also found in the 13th century BC; and an ostracon in the Cairo Museum (No. 25759), of the 11th century BC. All of these have Hebrew-like text written in Egyptian characters. If you know Egyptian, you can pronounce them but you don't know what they are saying because they are not Egyptian words. If you know Hebrew, you can't read it because the characters are not Hebrew characters. So, you have to know both languages in order to be able to read them-the writing system that was used as well as the language itself. That explains why King Benjamin had to teach Egyptian to his sons, because they had to understand how that written system worked in order to deal with the records, which had been started by Nephi in imitation of the Brass Plates, which we're told in Mosiah were also written in this Egyptian form (Mosiah 1:2).

What this demonstrate is that there were some Egyptian scribes who were sufficiently skilled in Northwestern Semitic languages, Hebrew and Canaanite, that they were able to transliterate using their own writing system. However, we now have similar writings from ancient Israel, in which Hebrew texts employ Egyptian characters. The first one comes from a place called Arad, which is about 24 miles south-southeast of Jerusalem. Several Hebrew letters written on ostraca were found there in 1965 dating between 598 and 587 BC. In that same year was found an ostracon that has purely Egyptian hieratic characters and Egyptian words, as well. However, in 1967, two years later, ostracon having a combination of Hebrew and Egyptian was unearthed. It is not one text then a translation of the same text into another language. The information was written in both sets of characters. There are 17 words on it. Of these, seven are written with Hebrew letters and ten are written with Egyptian characters. But the text itself is Egyptian. Even the words written in Hebrew letters are Egyptian words, not Hebrew.

In the 1970s, excavations in northern Sinai, known to the Israelites as Kadesh-barnea, where the Israelites had their main camp during the exodus, several ostraca of the 6th and 7th centuries BC were found. Some of them were scribal exercises only. One is the hieratic text including a column of Egyptian measures and five columns of numbers. Mingled in with these are some Hebrew characters, including the Hebrew word for one thousand, which is found on three times on the ostracon. The Hebrew word for “shekel” appears 22 times. There is one ostracon with three columns of numbers; the left-hand column has the Hebrew word for the smallest weight measure in use, and it immediately follows an Egyptian hieratic numeral. The interesting thing is that all of these were in use at the time of Lehi.