Why Judean coins minted during the Hasmonean dynasty or the first Jewish-Roman war contain text in paleo-Hebrew script
On the face of it, this shouldn’t be. At the time in question, Hebrew was no longer written in the old Canaanite script that prevailed until the fall of the Kingdom of Judea to the Babylonians around 586 BCE, but in a variation of the Assyrian version of that script, which the exiled Judeans adopted during their exile in Babylon after that conquest.
So using the old script was a kind of nationalist affectation, to proclaim the ancestral, pre-Babylonian-exile, Israelite origins of the newly-independent Hasmonean state. This is a bit like the motto of the British Royal Family (Dieu et mon droit — ‘God and my right’) which is in French, harking back to its Norman origins.
Modern Israel, by the way, does much the same: the Old Hebrew script is used on the modern sheqel coin (bottom left):
The difference is, in Hasmonean times, people knew what the Old Hebrew text said, whereas 99.9% of modern Israelis haven’t a clue: most people assume it says ‘sheqel’, but in fact, it spells Yehud—which ironically is not Hebrew, but the Persian name for its Judean province, dating back to the sixth century BCE, when Persia had just conquered the Babylonian empire, and allowed all exiled nations (the Judeans included) to return to their ancestral homes.
Incidentally, the three characters you see in the modern Israeli coin are yod-heh-dalet, which the ancient Greeks adopted (some time in the 9th or 8th century BCE) and changed to ΙΕΔ (iota-epsilon-delta)—i.e., the Hebrew H was turned into the vowel E, but the character forms were largely retained.
This entry was posted in Hebrew and tagged Hasmoneans, Hebrew, Language, Old Hebrew Script, Paleo Hebrew by יונתן אור-סתיו. Bookmark the permalink.
Originally published at https://byautumnlight.wordpress.com on November 15, 2022.
