Naville went so far as to suggest that the Akkadian documents which lie behind our Hebrew Old Testament (or at least the Pentateuch and Joshua) were in use until the time of Ezra who adapted them to the alphabet used by the Aramaic speaking Jews of the Persian Empire. This view is not seriously considered today, for we know that Early or Palaeo-Hebrew manuscripts antedate the Square or Aramaic form of the letters in current use. The Canaanite dialect in use at Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, was written in a cuneiform alphabet at a time contemporary with the Amarna texts. Another group of texts, dated about 1500 B.C., was discovered at the Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai Peninsula. There are about twenty-five inscriptions in all, written in a form of alphabetic writing which was clearly derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. Three short examples of the same alphabet, dating somewhat earlier than the Sinai inscriptions, have been discovered at Gezer, Lachish, and Shechem in southern Canaan. The oldest actual Hebrew inscription, using the Paleao-Hebrew script, is the Gezer Calendar (_ca._ 900 B.C.). We cannot know for certain the nature of the writing on the tables, or tablets of the Law (Exod. 34:27-28). Moses, raised as an Egyptian prince, probably knew both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Akkadian cuneiform, and he may have learned to write in an early form of the Hebrew alphabet as a result of contacts with his own people. The Amarna texts have underscored the fact that both Egypt and Canaan were highly literate during the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries before Christ. Canaanite Glosses Of particular interest to language students is the fact that the Amarna Letters frequently contain Canaanite words or expressions which are inserted to clarify the meaning of the Akkadian text, which was a foreign language to the scribe. These glosses are our earliest examples of the language which became Biblical Hebrew. While the language of Laban, and that branch of Abraham’s family which settled in northern Mesopotamia, was Aramaic (cf. Gen. 31:47 where Laban uses an Aramaic name), the Patriarchs who entered Canaan came to speak “the language of Canaan” (cf. Isa. 19:18) which became the classical language of the Old Testament. The cuneiform syllabary in which the Amarna texts were written indicates vowel sounds which are not expressed in the alphabetic Hebrew script. In this way philologists are able to reconstruct some of the sounds of the ancient language. Amarna Age Palestine