Paleo-Hebrew alphabet Paleo-Hebrew alphabet The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet (Hebrew: ), also spelt Palaeo-Hebrew alphabet, is a variant of the Phoenician alphabet. Like the Phoenician alphabet, the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet contains 22 letters, all of which are consonants, and is described as an abjad. The term was coined by Solomon Birnbaum in 1954; he wrote, "To apply the term Phoenician to the script of the Hebrews is hardly suitable". Still, the script is nearly identical to the Phoenician script. Archeological evidence of the use of the script by the Israelites for writing the Hebrew language dates to around the 10th century BCE. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
Cursive Hebrew The forms in the table below are representative of those in present-day use. The names appearing with the individual letters are taken from the Unicode standard and may differ from their designations in the various languages using them – see Hebrew alphabet / Pronunciation of letter names for variation in letter names. (Table is organized right-to-left reflecting Hebrew's lexicographic mode.) This table shows the development of cursive Hebrew from the 7th through the 19th centuries. This is discussed in the following section, which makes reference to the columns in the table, numbered 1 through 14. <br>Figure 3: "Cursive Writing" "(Jewish