As Moses stood between two worlds, so too did his people, navigating a fragile existence where oral tradition began to intersect with the emerging power of written language.

With Hebrew, the sociolinguistic reality becomes even more layered. The Hebrew people, if they were enslaved in Egypt for generations, as the Book of Exodus describes, likely had low levels of literacy. The local authorities would not have been overly concerned with literacy promotion campaigns amongst the slave classes. Besides, the culture at the time, regardless of the social class or civilisation, was largely oral. Knowledge, law and identity were transmitted through stories, songs and lineage, not scrolls.

Then something began to change during the Late Bronze Age for the Hebrew people. Around this time, a new kind of writing emerged in the region: early alphabetic scripts, sometimes called Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite. These were simpler than cuneiform or hieroglyphics, based on a consonantal alphabet.

These were possibly created by Semitic-speaking workers or slaves in Egypt and Sinai who adapted hieroglyphic symbols into phonetic letters, a kind of grassroots literacy innovation.

This point is crucial. If Hebrew slaves at the time learned to read and write, it would probably not have been in hieroglyphics. It might have been in this emerging Semitic script, the ancestor of what would become the Hebrew script.

The Purpose of Writing and Who was Excluded

In this ancient context, writing was never assumed to be for everyone. It had social functions, and most people did not need to be literate to live their lives. On the banks of the Nile, people could bake, sow seed and reap crops, pay their dues, without being literate. At a working-class level, which was the vast majority of society, not being able to read would not have been ‘disabling’ in any way. The economy, religion and politics of the ancient Near East were all based on oral memory, ritual performance and social hierarchy.

Accordingly, writing had two main functions:

·       Record-keeping, for the state, temples and trade.

·       Sacralisation, i.e. to preserve or perform divine truths.

Early texts like laws or treaties were often written not for mass readability, but for display: on walls, stelae and tablets.

So, when the Ten Commandments are inscribed in stone, they are likely to be intended as a monument, a covenant, and not a functional memo, for people to reference and read.

From Voice to Stone to Logos

The biblical tradition tells us that the commandments were written “by the finger of God”. These tablets were smashed and then Moses carved them again himself, dictated by God. If Moses undertook this task on his own, then he probably would have carved in the hieratic script, which was not readily adaptable to a Semitic language like Hebrew. It was essentially forcing an oral language into a script it was not well suited to. So, it could have been the opposite of the Proto writing developed by the Hebrew slaves, where the Egyptian script was gradually adapted to represent Hebrew sounds, eventually becoming an alphabetic script.

Regardless of the script that was used, the symbolism of a human recording divine words in writing is very important: spoken becomes written. This describes a major milestone in human development. It marks a shift from communal recitation to fixed covenant.

Moses, then, not only becomes lawmaker, but cultural mediator, a figure that stands between orality and literacy, between secrecy and communal law.

This is the coming into being of the word. From utterance to be remembered to monument to be referred to, reflected upon. From this point onwards, this development is woven through the entirety of Judeo-Christian tradition.

Consider the writing on the wall at the banquet of Balshazzar in the Book of Daniel: ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’, words appearing miraculously, written in Aramaic, visible but unreadable to all until interpreted by Daniel. (Side note: What that message may have looked like in the ancient Aramaic script is in the image above, courtesy of AI). The interesting aspect of this is that the scripture says

Fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace.

(Daniel 5.5)

This shows a further development in the practice of writing than in Moses’ day. The original Aramaic specifies a disembodied ‘hand’ that ‘wrote’ onto ‘plaster’. So, not carved or chiselled onto stone, but wrote. It could have been drawn in charcoal, ink, burnt into the surface by candle, scraped, scratched or etched into the plaster. But this is just a further stage in the evolution of writing. It was a different era: no longer the Bronze Age of Moses’ time, but the late Iron Age of Daniel. So, the function of writing became more intricate. The most important aspect of Daniel’s story is that a message now requires not just hearing but reading and decoding.

By this stage, the word is not only spoken. It must be seen, interpreted and understood.

This is echoed later in the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 

(John 1:1)

The divine voice becomes visible sign. What was once transient becomes fixed. The Word does not only guide, it takes form. These are metaphors for a turning point: oral and visual to word. Yet, now, this is a phase in human development that we may well be accelerating out of as we migrate from word back to oral and visual. Perhaps not a linear development, but circular: taking us right back to where we started out.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson, originally written in New York, USA, April 2024