The Hebrew Aleph-Bet

Around the time of Abraham (2000 BC?) a proto-Sinaitic script was developed in the Levant and ancient Near East (ANE.) That script was a precursor to most modern alphabet. Over the next thousand years, a proto-Hebrew developed in Canaan and King David and others during the First Temple period probably wrote in proto-Hebrew. During Hezekiah's reign (c. 700 BC) the king built a water tunnel, the Siloam Tunnel, intended to bring water to Jerusalem during a siege. Inscriptions recording the construction of the tunnel were written on the sides of the tunnel in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. They are some of the earliest examples we have of ancient Hebrew writing. Later, during the Babylonian captivity, the Hebrew text evolved, being influenced by the Babylonian Aramaic alphabet. Aramaic was another Semitic language similar to Hebrew. The Old Testament manuscripts, except for a few chapters (in Daniel and Ezra) were copied in Biblical Hebrew. This is not quite the same as modern Hebrew, the language of Israel.

The history of the alphabet is a fascinating topic -- most modern alphabets can be traced back to the ancient scripts in the ANE. For example, the first letter of the ancient Sinaitic script was drawing of an ox head. Even today, one can imagine a capital letter A as an ox looking up, with horns behind (below) his head. The Greek equivalent, alpha, 

looks very much like an ox head. (The capital alpha looked exactly like our modern A.)

Biblical Hebrew had 22 letters, all consonants. Vowels were not written. Here are the first two.

Aleph

Aleph is a consonant that effectively creates an ah sound. Technically, aleph is a glottal stop, common in many middle eastern languages but not often recognized in English. In Biblical Hebrew is was sometimes replaced by an apostrophe.

The ancient pre-Hebrew form of aleph was a drawing of an ox-head. Here, from the Wikipedia  proto-Sinaitic webpage is an analysis of the evolution of the script for the first letter of the alphabet.

In modern Hebrew there can be several ways to write aleph, depending on the anticipated style. (Just as English has a cursive style, modern Hebrew also has several writing styles, including a "written" form and a "print" form. Here they are for aleph.

(Many of these drawings are from this video on Hebrewpod101. The video covers the first dozen or so Hebrew letters, along with nikud symbols, in just under 40 minutes. It is useful but also an advertisement for Hebrewpod101.com.)

Bet

The second Hebrew letter is Bet.

The letter developed from an ancient drawing of a house and in Hebrew, bet (or beth) means "house". For example, Beth-lehem was the "house of bread."

I'm following the  Hebrewpod101 video.  Here are the scripts for bet.

With these two symbols we can spell abba, Father. Here, from that video is abba. (Remember, the first letter, that is, the first ah, is on the right!)

Bet generally sounds like a b, as in but, but, like many languages, the b-sound can be softened to a v-sound. This change if sound is denoted by removing the circle from inside the letter. So here is bet making a v-sound.

I find this interesting

In English, we often ask a child to recite their "A-B-Cs". We use this expression for the alphabet since A, B, C are the first three letters of the 26 letters in the English language. If we take the first two letters of Greek, we instead have alpha-beta.  It is from those first two letters that we have the word alphabet.; it is a Greek translation of "A-B".  So the Hebrew children learned their aleph-bet.  I am working on this and I now have two of the 22 letters of the aleph-bet!  We will work on other letters in later posts.

In mathematics, English letters like x, y, a, b, are often used for variables. When it becomes important to emphasize additional variables, mathematicians often use Greek letters. However, in one case, in the writings of Georg Cantor, the Hebrew letter aleph was used to denote different types of infinities. The symbol aleph naught (below) denotes the smallest infinity, the cardinal number representing any countable set. 

Resources

In addition to the Hebrewpod101 video, Christian publisher Zondervan has a channel which includes this lecture in Hebrew. I am also using this text on basic Hebrew, Read Hebrew in 22 Days or Less by Seltzer, Lizorkin-Eyzenberg and Shir.

Wikipedia has an article on aleph and another one on bet.