Ten Commandments
89
in alphabetical script, which was conceived
by the people of Israel.53) The reason for
placing the letters Alef and
Bet at the top of
the alphabetical order, and thus the very
name of the alphabet results from
the Ten Command- ments, for their first
line begins on face A of the first
stone tablet with the letter Alef,
and their second line on face B with
the letter Bet. The Bible constitutes
the oldest collection of alphabetical
literature that grew around the law of
the two tablets of the
Torah of Moses, and the
alphabet contains the key
to their three-dimensional structure.54)
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53) Not every phonetic script is an
alphabet in the strict sense characterized
by its unique alphabetical order: Neither
the so-called Egyptian "alphabet" of
one-consonant hieroglyphs nor the
so-called Ethiopian "alphabet", in spite of its
Sinaitic origin, are true alphabets, because
Alef and Bet were never placed
at the top of their sequence of letters,
and not sharing the Torah of Moses
with Israel, there was no reason to
do so.
54) See TORAH OF THE ALPHABET
(N. 1) p. 18. The original meaning of
the Tablets of the Law has to be
distinguished from their later interpretation
(above Note 46). Such a
double interpretation (duplex interpretatio) is also
known in Roman Law, where the Corpus
Juris of the Emperor Justinian may
differ widely from the classical original, cf.
Fritz Schulz (N. 20) p. 4.
Similarly, what the Constitution of the
United States of America means today is
not always what the founding fathers meant.
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