Ten Commandments
71
were the first document ever to be
written in the alphabet, began with
Bet.14) So I
tried it out, writing the 32 letters of
the first line from right to left, and
the second line beginning with letter no.
33 (Bet) from left to right.15) To my surprise, the
biblical verse and the grammatical sentence
(Exodus 20, 3 = Deuteronomy 5, 7)
ended with letter no. 31 of the
second line. Of course, the
first line would likewise have 31 letters,
if its letter no. 32 were
placed between the lines marking their
minimum space of one letter-unit.16)
§
7. Encouraged by this result I continued
writing, without spaces between words, in
lines of 31 letters each plus one
turning-letter between
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14) The number 33 or Lag
(Lamed = 30 and Gimel = 3)
reminds of Lag ba-Omer, a Jewish
holiday 33 days after Passover that
commemorates Rabbi Akiva ben
Joseph and his students, especially
Shimon bar Yochai, in whose school
the Sefer Yetzirah originated in
the second century
of the Common Era,
see Gershom Scholem,
Kabbalah (1974) pp.
23–30. It deals
with the writing (Sefirot) of the Ten
Commandments.
15) In this respect I followed the
example of the oldest Greek inscriptions,
which are still very close to
ancient Hebrew script immediately
after borrowing it from
Israel, as well as
the proto-Sinaitic inscriptions.
16) My personal standards of orderliness
happened to be the same as
ancient Egyptian technique,
cf. Note 29 infra.
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