Alpha Beta

by Wayne Blank

An alphabet is a set of written characters that are used to compose words in written form. Humanity has invented many alphabets since the beginning, but as far as Bible History is concerned, the Old Testament (see Old Testament Fact File, The Older Testament and Which Bible Did Jesus Use?) was written mostly in Hebrew (i.e. from the ancient Hebrew People), while the New Testament (see New Testament Fact File) was written mostly in Greek which was still very much the lingua franca, the common language, of the Mediterranean region at the time, despite the Greeks (see Ancient Empires - Greece) having been surpassed by the Romans (see Ancient Empires - Rome), exactly as prophesied long before (see Daniel's Statue), as the leading nation of the "world." The English word alphabet is derived from the first two letters of the Greek "alphabet," alpha and beta.

The Hebrew Alphabet

Hebrew is a member of the ancient West-Semitic family of languages, which includes Aramaic (see Fact Finder question below), Syriac, Moabite, Phoenician and others.

The Greek Alphabet

Greek is a member of the Indo-European group of languages. Greek was one of the foremost languages of ancient times, and was in many ways the "English" of its day i.e. people from many nations and languages used Greek as a common language to communicate. It was still so prominent at the time of the first coming of the Messiah that it was used to write the New Testament. Jesus Christ, in using the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet (alpha and omega) as an analogy, referred to Himself as "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." (Revelation 22:13 RSV)

Fact Finder: Along with Hebrew and Greek, what other language (and alphabet) was Jesus Christ fluent?
See Aramaic

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