Messianics and Pictograms?

 Messianics and Pictograms?

Paleo-Hebrew is the ancient Hebrew script, used in writing OT texts. This script is an alphabet and nothing more and has no pictorial significance or hidden meaning. Scholars in the field of linguistics know that by the time a language develops into a written language, such as we see in the alphabetic characters in Paleo-Hebrew, it ceases to be a pictographic language, this means that the developed letters do not any longer stand for pictures, they represent sounds!

Developing a written alphabet as a means to simplify communication, meant doing away with hundreds or perhaps thousands of symbols, whereas, an alphabet needs no more that about 30 symbols for communication purposes. The purpose of an alphabet was to isolate sounds, thus developing a symbol to represent these sounds!

The early forms of the Hebrew alphabet were pictograms and developed into single symbols, in time the pictures lost their meaning being superseded by the developed letter to represent the sound, therefore, trying to read scripture according to pictures is invalid and meaningless!

It would be like taking Egyptian Hieroglyphs (pictograms) which developed into Hieratic Script, when itself developed into Demotic Script (c. 7th cent. bce), then as time went on Demotic became more streamlined and the script itself became shortened.

Demotic was used for Legal documents, such as business, courts, and administration.

One could use the same argument for Greek, as it is based on the old Phoenician script, basically Paleo-Hebrew and developed into the ancient Greek script that we know, but would we even try and apply what the “pictographic” camp is trying to do with ancient Hebrew pictures, which have no meaning anymore in ancient Greek!

Messianics are the ones who buy into the pictogram, but it is nonsense!

Consider,

We could say that English words can be “decoded”. Greek was derived from the ancient Phoenician alphabet, in time that script (alphabet) was borrowed by the Romans and we ended up with a developed Latin alphabet, as we know it, yet English is based on the Latin alphabet, thus, the ancient Phoenician (Paleo-Hebrew) letter “Beth” is the English letter “B”, but that ancient letter depicted a “house” and the rounded English “B” resembles the “ancient Phoenician/Paleo-Hebrew depicting a “house”. We could interpret this to mean that the pictographic understanding of Hebrew terms would be as nonsensical as taking English words from a line in a scifi novel and then selecting random words and giving them a decoded meaning and that is exactly what Messianics are doing with ancient Phoenician/Paleo-Hebrew pictograms and it is deluded nonsense!