Question re origin of the alephbet order, and of gematria

I am interested in various separate but related issues, and will appreciate any substantiated information regarding them:

What is the earliest printed record, manuscript, pottery shard, coin or stone indicating the notion of

• that there was a canonical order of the alephbet (like the cuneiform abecedary shown in the figure below); was the Hebrew order different than the accepted one of preceding alphabets?
• attaching number-values to letters - ie gematria (it would be in the chumash if there was validity to my idea of Mazle"g being "Mey zayin le-gimmel" where zayin means either object or shape or weapon, but gimmel means the number three.
• the idea of words having meanings according to their numerical value;
• finding words spelled out by the initial letters of of consecutive words (eg: "yom hashishi. Vayechulu hashamayim". And which is the earliest printed source, a manuscript or coin or stone, pottery, which indicates this; was this source known to later writers who used this method?what was the status of the books written by David & Shlomo HaMelech in their own time? Were the alphabetic acrostics Eshet Chayil, Ashrei etc known in their time? If so, how come this style doesn't appear in the prophetic books written later? (ie why does it appear only in ksuvim - was it common but not used in tanach until late?) or maybe it was made holy, or canonized, and or only was revealed at a later time.

Either H' created an order before the universe, or after, but before humans create alphabets, or after humans had an alphabet but not an order of the letters, and maybe it was pre-existent and so when humans came up with it the order was given as inspiraiotn.

Otherwise, no meaning to gematria etc.

Chazal's quesiotn of why Torah begins with Bet implies there is an order and aleph is first, and this implies chazal believes indeed there was an order.Are we required to believe this?

Some halachos are learned from gematria or the order? or were those limudin only asmachta?

Does chazal give a reason why this alephbet order is the true one?

For example: Why "Ox, house, camel" etc? Or does chazal not enfranchise or require belief in these origins of the letters?

What do anthropologists say about the choice of these animals etc, or do they not believe in this as the original source of the shapes etc?

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Are there prakim in chumash and neviim with 22 psukim, all begining with different letters?

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re מַזְלֵג in chumash: My derivation of "Mazleg" as "mizayin le gimmel" (see explanaiton below) relies on a pun assuming gimmel means three (prongs).

I think there is no other word in tanakh using the assumed root זְלֵג

and I see that its spelling is unusual:(wiki) המעיין במקרא יבחין כי המילה מצויה הן בצורת היחיד הן בצורת הרבים. אולם למרבה ההפתעה שונה הריבוי המקראי (מִזְלָגוֹת) מהריבוי השגור בפינו (מַזְלְגוֹת). תופעה זו חלה גם במילים מקראיות אחרות (מַשְׁבֵּר למשל), אך אינה תואמת את הריבוי הנהוג במשקל מַקְטֵל

Possibly it is from 'to drip', but that does not seem to be the case. If so, I would suppose that it is because when the meat begins to sizzle and drip, that is when the מַזְלֵג is used, or to make it drip. Therefore 'mizaleg'.

Sefer shmuel gives the meaning וְהַמַּזְלֵג שְׁלֹשׁ הַשִּׁנַּיִם

So it is specifically 3-pronged. Can it be that the word is an acronym: it was made like a dagger('zayin'), but split in 3 (= ג) prongs -> "may zayin le gimmel" = mzl"g.

(but then by definition mazleg has three prongs, so why specify? maybe my the time of Shmuel [the origin of the word was lost to most people and] this redundant term was used, like saying 'mayim achronim vasser'.

However this depends on an old question of mine: the canonical/halachik/haskafic status of the order of the alephbet.

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Is there special mystical significance to a split, like "וּמִשָּׁם, יִפָּרֵד וְהָיָה לְאַרְבָּעָה רָאשִׁים"? which would be of relevance here?

(But it is odd that unkelus and rashi use 'tzinoros' to explain it, not clear what they mean; by the way it seems that forks as eating implements arrived in Europe quite late, so maybe Rashi was not familiar with it? But doesn;t sefer shmuel's explanaiton clarify? or was it taken to refer to a specifc mazleg?)

Since another possibility was that there is a star-cluster in a pitchfork shape, so it would be mazal-gimmel, I did a brief search but didn;t see any likely candidates.

Also: it is one of the (many) kelim which betzalel made, so it must have great significance; which references speak about the deeper meaning of this specific implement?

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מצאתי את זה:

רש"ר הירש שמות פרק כז פסוק ג

ומזלגתיו - "מזלג" משורש "זלג", בארמית: ירידת דמעות, קרוב ל"שלך", נופל, ומכאן "השליך", הפיל, "שלג" ו"סלק" בארמית; הוראת היסוד היא אפוא: נפילה במקום ופינוי מן המקום. "מזלג" מציין כלי שבו מסלקים דבר מן המקום כדי להניחו במקום אחר.

יש ראשי תיבות בתורה. "אנכי" - אנא נפשי כתיבת יהבית (שבת קה ע"א)

סדר האותיות - חז"ל למדו הלכות מגימטריות, כמו "קדוש יהיה" - מכאן שסתם נזירות שלשים יום (נזיר ה ע"א). והרי גימטריא מבוססת על סדר האותיות. מכאן שלפי חז"ל סדר האותיות הוא מסיני.

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1.) The first two letters plus the last three are א-ב ר-ש-ת.

אם נצרף את אות י' מהאותיות האמצעיות לאותיות אלו , נקבל "אב י רשת", ומכאן עולה המלה "בראשית".

"בראשית" מתקבל(ת) ע"י בחירת האותיות "אב י רשת" בזיגזג , "רצוא ושוב" (.2

כל אותיות הא"ב מופיעות בסיפור הבריאה חוצ מ האות ס' ש חסרה " (.3

4) There are 17 אותיות between אב...רשת , but without the ס' there are 16, האמצעיות הן י ו-כ . And therefore "אב י רשת" can be seen as the first, last and middle letters.

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Interesting that Ashrei lacks a letter, like breishis, but it is nun, the one before samech. Are there other acrostics that miss a letter? Which letter?

Thilim uses acrostics, so the order of the letters in the aleph bet was fixed by then. Presumably there should be a reason the writer considered that order important. I'd like one day to try to see if there is a way to find this order via the chumash.

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The first ordering of the alephbet as an acrostic seems to have been used in thilim (ashrei), mishle (eshet khayil) etc, not earlier. Is there any indicaiotn in chumash or neviim of this ordering? Is there any reference in neviim that the order of the alephbet is significant (of course kabalh and midrash talk of it, and issue of why the torah starts with the letter beis assumes this etc)? If the origin of the word mazleg is as I suggested above, it implies that gimmel was the third letter and also that the order of the letters was used to indicate numbers. Where is the first obvious mention of a letter as a number?

[I came up with an alternate scenario, not that I am actually proposing it, espcecially if it is 'heresy': for example: Dovid HaMelech and shlomo hamalech's mother wanted to write a 'poem' using all the letters as line-beginnings, but the order of the letters was not significant; they wrote out ashrei or eshes chayil with caligraphy and hung it up for shlomo to learn as a baby, and he saw the first letters written calligraphically, larger, and learned the alphabet from it, and always recited the letters in that order, and since that time he made it the standard order. Or that Dovid HaMelech was then given nevuah that this indeed was the intended order. etc.

Or that people noticed that there were thilim etc in which there were exactly 22 lines and each began with a different letter (perhaps to be expected statistically?), and then it became common to write these out with calligraphy to teach kids the letters, or Dovid HaMelech noticed these and hung them up as mentioned earlier.]

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Are there acronyms in tanach?[of course 'tanach' is an acronym :) ]

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Archaeological sources:

The Ugaritic script is a cuneiform (wedge-shaped) abjad used from around either the fifteenth century BCE^[1] or 1300 BCE^[2] for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages (particularly Hurrian) were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, although not elsewhere.

See the order of the wedge-letters on this abedecery, according to the list below it:

Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the North Semitic and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the reduced Phoenician alphabet and its descendants (including Greek and Latin) on the one hand, and of the Ge'ez alphabet on the other.

At the time the Ugaritic script was in use (ca. 1300–1190 BCE),^[8] Ugarit was at the centre of the literate world, among Egypt, Anatolia, Cyprus, Crete, and Mesopotamia. Ugaritic combined the system of the Semitic abjad with cuneiform writing methods (pressing a stylus into clay). However, scholars have searched in vain for graphic prototypes of the Ugaritic letters in Mesopotamian cuneiform. Recently, some have suggested that Ugaritic represents some form of the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet,^[9] the letter forms distorted as an adaptation to writing on clay with a stylus. (There may also have been a degree of influence from the poorly understood Byblos syllabary.^[10]) It has been proposed in this regard that the two basic shapes in cuneiform, a linear wedge, as in 𐎂, and a corner wedge, as in 𐎓, may correspond to lines and circles in the linear Semitic alphabets: the three Semitic letters with circles, preserved in the Greek Θ, O and Latin Q, are all made with corner wedges in Ugaritic: 𐎉 ṭ, 𐎓 ʕ, and 𐎖 q. Other letters look similar as well: 𐎅 h resembles its assumed Greek cognate E, while 𐎆 w, 𐎔 p, and 𐎘 θ are similar to Greek Y, Π, and Σ turned on their sides.^[9] Jared Diamond^[11] believes the alphabet was consciously designed, citing as evidence the possibility that the letters with the fewest strokes may have been the most frequent.Abecedaries[edit]

Lists of Ugaritic letters (abecedaria, singular abecedarium) have been found in two alphabetic orders: the "Northern Semitic order" more similar to the one found in Arabic (earlier order), Hebrew and Phoenician, and more distantly, the Greek and Latin alphabets; and the "Southern Semitic order" more similar to the one found in the South Arabian, and the Ge'ez alphabets. The letters are given in transcription and in their Arabic and Hebrew cognates; letters missing from Hebrew are left blank.

North Semitic

South Semitic

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From: http://ask.metafilter.com/35550/Why-A

'The Articulatory Basis of the Alphabet' search in the page for "order of the alphabet":

"There has been equally various speculation about the factors determining the order of the alphabet and argument about whether or not the order has any special significance. Driver has a useful discussion of this: "The order of the Phoenician alphabet is attested by the evidence of the Hebrew scriptures [acrostic Psalms] and confirmed by external authority.. [the step at Lachish]... The most fantastic reasons for the order of the letters have been suggested based, for example, on astral or lunar theories, even to the extent of using South-Semitic meanings of cognate words to explain the North-Semitic names. Another method has been to seek for mnemonic words which the successive letters when combined into words may spell out [ab gad father grandfather -from different language dialects]" (Driver, 1954: 181) "The order of the alphabet has recently been explained as representing a didactic poem.... The latest suggestion is that the order of the letters of the Semitic alphabet is based on the notation of the Sumerian musical scales". (Driver, 1954: 268) Diringer briefly remarks: "As to the order of the letters, various theories have been propounded, but here again [as for the names of the letters] it is highly probable that the matter has no particular significance...There is some appearance of phonetic grouping in the order of the letters of the North Semitic alphabet, but this may be accidental"(Diringer 1968: 169-170)." (emphasis added)

The Alphabet Effect: A Media Ecology Understanding of the Making of Western Civilization (google cache, pdf here)

"The alphabetic order of the letters became fixed for the first time with the Ugaritic script of the fourteenth to thirteenth ce…

The Phoenician's work "aleph" meant "ox," and the letter "a" was made to look like a ox's head. The ox, the most important animal of the time ntury. With rare exception all alphabetic scripts follow the same order,

THE PHOENICIANS

Although the Phoenician alphabet probably developed about the same time as the Ugarits, they are much more important because they spread their alphabet throughout much of the world. They were traders who used their alphabet to track inventories, standardize accounting procedures, etc; they left no literature or books behind. They carried their alphabet to most of the major Mediterranian ports by 1000 BC.

They had totally dropped out picture sounds and kept only the symbols that signified sounds. The Phoenician's work "aleph" meant "ox," and the letter "a" was made to look like a ox's head. The ox, the most important animal of the time, was the basis for the first letter of most European and Semetic languages, including later, English. They also had no vowels.

THE GREEKS

The Greeks took their favorite elements from the Semetic and Phoenician languges. They took 16 consonants from the Phoenician language and addes five vowels: alpha, epsilon, upsilon, iota, omikron. Alpha became the first letter of the Greek alphabet. They was not taken from the Phoenician aleph, which was a consonant, but from the Hebrew language, where aleph also happened to mean ox. The first letters of the Hebrew alphabet are "aleph, beth, gemel, dalth," which mean "ox, house, camel, door." The Greek equivilants are alpha, beta, gamma, delta. The Greeks needed vowels to express the sounds they made in their language. The Phoenicians did not have them, and though the Hebrew language did inclufe some vowel sounds,, they were used erratically and sporadically. So the Greeks took Hebrew consonants that had no use in speaking Greek(like aleph) and converted them into vowels.

By adding a few consonants of their own, they ended up with 24 letter alphabet. They had no c or v, and some of their letters stood for different sounds than they do now. However, the order was pretty much the same as it is today, with a few exceptions(z was 6th letters).

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Why is its name called "gold" [ZaHaV], because it includes three attributes - male (Zachar), this is the "zayin"; the Soul, this is the letter "heh", corresponding to the five levels of the soul: Ruach, Chaya, Yechida, Nefesh and Neshama. What is the purpose of the "heh"? It is a throne for the "zayin", as it is written, "For one above the other watches." The "bet" is its sustenance. As it is written, "In the beginning" (Bereshit) [Genesis 1:1].

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