Why the alphabetical order is like it is, is a question which, as far as I know, had never been asked before. It led me to analyzing the alphabetical order prior to reconstructing the Mosaical Tablets of the Law. Thus in spring of 1983, I discovered the two-dimensional structure of the alphabetical order, which presented some hints for reconstructing the tablets, such as their format of 6 by 4 or one by one and a half cubits as well as the alternating (boustrophedon) arrangement of lines.

The alphabet is one of the greatest cultural achievements of mankind. According to Eupolemus (ca. 150 B. C. E.), it was Moses who invented the alphabet in the Sinai, and taught the people of Israel, the Phoenicians got it from the Jews, and the Greeks from the Phoenicians. In the opinion of Hubert Grimme, late professor of Semitic languages at the University of Münster, Germany, the Mosaical Tablets of the Law were one of the first, if not the first document in alphabetical script.

Before the invention of the alphabet, Egypt had already a highly complicated phonetic script of consonants, consisting of almost 3000 uniliteral, biliteral, and triliteral hieroglyphs. The simplification of script was a political issue. Anybody who had gotten a good education in Egypt, as Moses probably did, knew that the 24 one-consonant hieroglyphs were sufficient to write the language, so why not abolish all the rest? Of course, this was against the interest of an aristocracy of scribes.

The Exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt in 1441 B. C. E. or 480 years before 961 B. C. E, when King Solomon began to build the First Temple in Jerusalem (1. Kings 6, 1), was the time for the introduction of the alphabet. A simplified script of some twenty odd letters made literacy and learning available to everybody. This was as desirable in the ancient Republic of Israel founded by Moses in the Sinai, as a high degree of alphabetization is in new democracies even today.

The two stone Tablets of the Law of the Torah of Moses from the Sinai are the first legal document in alphabetical script after its invention. The alphabet in the strict sense is characterized by the firm alphabetical order of its 22 consonants, and takes its name from its first two letters Aleph and Bet. No alphabets are the 24 one-consonant hieroglyphs, whose conventional order is modern, nor the letters of ancient south-Semitic script, which is a non-alphabetic descendant of proto-Sinaitic.

In the first quarter of the first millennium B. C. E., during the golden age of Israel from King David and Solomon to the Assyrian Exile, ancient Hebrew script is identical with Phoenician script, which I prefer to call the Hebrew-Phoenician alphabet. During this period it was adopted from Israel by the Phoenicians, not vice versa, and adapted to cuneiform writing by Ugarit, for it bears the phonetic fingerprint of Israel, who unlike the Phoenicians had no th-sound, as Plutarch reports.