Paul D. LeBlanc, Deciphering the Proto-Sinaitic Script

As it relates to the academic study of the Bible in the 20 th century, there are primarily two opposing poles that have emerged among scholars — with biblical minimalists on the one end, and biblical maximalists on the other. To oversimplify, minimalists tend to not consider the Bible as a valid historical document due to the contradictions that can be found between the biblical narrative and all that has been dug up by archaeologists over the past century in the Near East. Maximalists, on the other hand, usually assume that the Bible texts are more or less correct, unless archaeological evidence can incontrovertibly prove otherwise. To exacerbate matters, some radical minimalists in the field have not only raised the question of historical reliability of the Bible, but they have altogether dismissed it as being purely fictional — only to be read as (religious) literature. Most scholars hate these labels because, after all, a label is just a label, and nothing is ever so clear...

From its initial appearance, in around the 18th century BC, the origins of proto–Sinaitic writing can be traced back to Egypt’s Middle Kingdom period, when it was somehow derived from the hieroglyphs, its parent–system. The importance of proto–Sinaitic lies in the fact that it represents the alphabet’s earliest developmental period—a kind of ‘missing link’ between the hieroglyphs and these early Semitic alphabets from which our own Latin one descends, by way of the Phoenician and Greek. However, up until now, proto-Sinaitic has remained for the most part undeciphered. The intriguing possibility of giving voice to a lost culture or civilization from thousands of years ago is tantalizing. Representing one of the most enticing problems in modern archaeology, the  enigmatic allure surrounding ancient languages and the undeciphered scripts in which they are encoded is truly vexing. In the course of my research into deciphering the proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, I have inadvertently ...