Ancient Hebrew & related matters

[Verifyveritas76]

This whole debate reminds me of another found in John 7


John 7:46-49
The officers answered, Never man spake † like this man.
Then answered them the Pharisees, Are ye also deceived? †?
Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him?
But this people who knoweth not the law are cursed.

Matt. 13:10-15
And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables?
He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.
For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.
Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive:
For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.

I find it interesting as well as predictive that God always hides his mysteries within a media that doesnt require a scribe to decipher it.
I also find it very interesting that the demographic that would have been voted most likely to recognize Messiah, failed miserably at nearly every encounter to do so, often because they were expecting the 3 dimensional Son of God to conform to their interpretation of a 2 dimensional script.
I also find it interesting that after Saul spends 3 years in Arabia that he returns with "mysteries" that are revolutionary to the status quo in the church at Jerusalem who accepted Christ as Messiah. To those comfortably sequestered within the pseudo-Israelite religion of the day, these "new" mysteries would have inevitably engendered wrath and hatred on a level not seen since . . .um every other prophet except Daniel and David.

 

[Verifyveritas76]

Galatians 4:24
Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one † from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar.
For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia,

 

[Verifyveritas76]

@FollowingHim would you mind moving this thought to a new thread. Perhaps from my post on the Adown. I think that we/I have hijacked the thread and I have another thought on the original thread.

 

[IshChayil]

I must be missing something, IC. The Norse runes comprise a phonetic alphabet of a coupla dozen characters and each character has a profound symbolic significance. So Hebrew doesn't map to Egyptian hieroglyphs (or Asian pictographs or whatever), but I don't see why you see phonics and symbols as mutually exclusive. Seems like a false dichotomy to me. What am I missing?

I think you may be mistaken regarding how the runic alphabets functioned...I think the same kind of misunderstanding about paleo Hebrew is being applied to the runic alphabets.

reread my post before the EGyptian hieroglyphs I made where I explain the reasoning why to this won't work. Nobody is saying the ancient letters werent originally a picture of something. most letters in most alphabets were originally pictures of something.

You can certainly isolate a symbol by itself as runes were ought used (especially by the occult used in divination) and say "oh this symbol means this" but that does not add meaning
to words in lengthy documents, say, a book.
We can do the same with Shin in Hebrew "teeth" and use that magicly or in an inscription by itself to mean teeth theoretically but when you say the only way to write a word with "sh' sound is to use teeth, it no longer adds value.
please reread my next to last post (I think) where I explain it deeply to @Mojo
I start with Adam and walk through why it won't work without getting into linguistic theory.

Runes worked similarly to "proto-Hebrew".
Each symbol was a picture of something, but was simply used phonetically when writing a word. So while the letter for "s" might mean sun (can't embed pictures in this forum software apparantly or I'd include it) head on over to wikipedia to see it.
If I wanted to write a word in one of the runic systems that had the 's' SOUND in it, I had to use the sun sqiggly sign. Again my only choice. Having less choices in the alphabet makes it even *less* possible to imply extra depth so the runic system would be a good example of even having less of a chance to convey deeper meanings of words written with an alphabet with even fewer than the Hebrew 22.
(sorry for my spelling issuesI see many red underlines but I'm in a hurry-German language wrecked my confidence in English spelling).

In short, any significance individual letters once had, they have only when they are written alone without any other letters, not part of a word. Just like runic alphabets, the letters when individual had the significance of what they were a drawing of. Even Egyptian with it's myriad signs, you could always draw a sign alone with a stick under it to mean "don't read this as a sign, it's a picture of what I'm talking about".
Presumably in the ancient paleo-hebrew as the alphabet was forming that's probably why we got those picture signs as originally they were likely just a picture of what the person want'ed to represent. Shin for teeth etc.
But when they became alphabetic we don't see any systems where they influence the larger rhealm of phonetic words; mostly as I said because the ancients gave themselves no choices. If you want to write English "shush" with Hebrew letters, you have to use the teeth picture to make the 'sh' sign and then later people getting into the picture nuances of words can use that example "look see! it's saying 'shush' for be quiet and there are pictures of teeth in the word! wow look at the deep significance!
No, it's just lucky in that case that teeth made the sh sound, but no so lucky that "sh'ma" (hear) starts with "teeth" ... I think we'd rather prefer it started with an ear, or lips...but the way the perceptions work the more we think about it, a creative person can always come up with a way that teeth have something to do with hearing.. for example, you need teeth to make certain dental sounds! Wow it's so deep!
Ok so what about the word for grave "sh'eol" gotta write it with 'teeth'.
So then the zealous follower of protosigns out of a deep desire to just ...make it work... will say "Look when you dig the hole in the ground to bury someone you it's lke the shovel is teeth biting the ground wow it always works!"..
It's an endless loop of creative speculation and I think when I list the words for destruction, breast, juice, sustenance, reluctance, clever, etc. someone can always find a reason why "teeth" had to be part of that when the clearly observable fact is that if I want to write any word, including a new word with an 'sh' sound in it. I just have no choice than to use the sign that originally was a picture of teeth. If I only had other choices for 'sh' then I can be creative like the picture i made in Egyptian to share with you guys how this works.
But alas, in Hebrew we are stuck with just teeth for anything. Internal organs with 'sh' sound, teeth, abstract concepts of intelligence ... teeth BUT WAIT, WISDOM TEETH!!!
you see how it's unending because people are very creative but creativity does not equal sound reasoning.

Usually in most languages the way an alphabet comes into being is that the picture of the thing people used before they could write full words, i.e. the head in old Semitic languages, people realized the first sound of that word they could reuse the symbol to write anything with that first sound. Head is 'r' for 'rosh'(Head) and then later was used as 'r' for "chaver" friend.
It's called the Rebus principle and some languages go farther so you can use the first sound, or even the first 2 sounds, or first 3 (Egyptian does that). So the scarab beatle in Egyption (H-p-r) I could almost use for any word that had all 3 of those consonants. Most languages just settled for the first sound being reusable. Hebrew, Old Norse, etc.

shalom

OK so I have 2 lengthy explanations.
1-shows example I made i Hieroglyphs of a Hebrew word and explains how it works in EGyptian and systems like that and why it doesn't work in Hebrew.
Click here: http://biblicalfamilies.org/forum/threads/ancient-hebrew-related-matters.13358/page-2#post-145852

The other is a walk through of how one would go from pictures to a full blown language using pictures or not and the reason Adam (or whoever) didn't do it that way. This is a shorter explanation.
click here: [URL="http://biblicalfamilies.org/forum/threads/ancient-hebrew-related-matters.13358/page-2#post-145832"]Ancient Hebrew & related matters[/URL]

 

[IshChayil]

Whoa! That's a lot of info there. I will try to process it little by little later.

My question (asking lots of questions is my usual style around here) was not necessarily to aid in the micro details of the argument about symbolism vs phonetics. On a macro-level, I asked this question to highlight my point about experts seeing things from a bias of known knowledge, but not stopping to think about unknown knowledge. Just because the Hebrew we now know (paleo or modern) appears to be phonetic, does that mean it always was? Is it an absolute? I don't have the answer, but it's an interesting prospect to me.

My head is spinning in all this. I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it. I think I will tap out now.

Short answer (as my long answer started before).
Yes, it's possible.
But we haven't found any writings that worked this theoretical way you are positing.
It would be very neato. There are alphabets that did have letters added so we get closer to that possibility but my point is that with the bible, even if we found some great ancient stone slab that had an example of 500 letters being used; we don't have the bible in that form so we would not be able to reverse-engineer it back to the beautiful depth of that ancient way of writing you are positing. Once the writing system shifted to simple alphabet like in English.
English letters once also had meanings to each letter; it was a picture but with our 26 letters there is no more depth to which letter we choose for a word than there is to the bible's 22 letters in Hebrew.

 

[IshChayil]

Galatians 4:24
Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one † from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar.
For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia,

If we want to tackle the notion of Mt. Sinai in "Saudia" Arabia, I suggest you start a new thread about that too.
The whole proto-Hebrew/Paleo-Hebrew topic is deep enough right? (just like your great suggestion to break it out from the old thread).
This will all help with SEO also and keep bringing more people to our forum where they can be released from the modern "tradition of the elders" of the churches outlawing polygamy.

 

[IshChayil]

This whole debate reminds me of another found in John 7


John 7:46-49
The officers answered, Never man spake † like this man.
Then answered them the Pharisees, Are ye also deceived? †?
Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him?
But this people who knoweth not the law are cursed.

Matt. 13:10-15
And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables?
He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.
For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.
Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive:
For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.

I find it interesting as well as predictive that God always hides his mysteries within a media that doesnt require a scribe to decipher it.
I also find it very interesting that the demographic that would have been voted most likely to recognize Messiah, failed miserably at nearly every encounter to do so, often because they were expecting the 3 dimensional Son of God to conform to their interpretation of a 2 dimensional script.
I also find it interesting that after Saul spends 3 years in Arabia that he returns with "mysteries" that are revolutionary to the status quo in the church at Jerusalem who accepted Christ as Messiah. To those comfortably sequestered within the pseudo-Israelite religion of the day, these "new" mysteries would have inevitably engendered wrath and hatred on a level not seen since . . .um every other prophet except Daniel and David.

only the process of unbelief in the Messiah you mention... it's no mystery...

25 Οὐ γὰρ θέλω ὑμᾶς ἀγνοεῖν, ἀδελφοί, τὸ μυστήριον τοῦτο, ἵνα μὴ ἦτε [παρ᾽] ἑαυτοῖς φρόνιμοι, ὅτι πώρωσις ἀπὸ μέρους τῷ Ἰσραὴλ γέγονεν ἄχρι οὗ τὸ πλήρωμα τῶν ἐθνῶν εἰσέλθῃ

So I desire to to make you aware oh my brothers, this mystery,
In order that you are not yourselves wise, namely because stubborness (hardness) has come from the part of Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has entered. -Romans 11:25
(sorry this forum software doesn't play nicely with Greek biblical text-it likes Hebrew though!)

Israel’s majority refusing to see is no mystery; it’s G-d’s mercy for Gentiles.

-------------back to pretending that Hebrew functions like Egyptian or Khanji or ...------
artistically creating a depth of lettering that is not there, and wasting time on such pursuits does not add value; it's time that can actually be spent learning the language.
I've clearly detailed both linguistically and methodically how Hebrew in the form in which the bible was written can not function this way. I've demonstrated this Brenner fellow and his lexicon are built on the sand that is universally rejected by Hebrew scholars and seminaries (Strong's concordance).

The blindness at this point is continuing to see something that's not there because the pictures are pretty and it's fun to treat or mistreat a language this way.

The holy tongue is glorious and amazing and doesn't need artificial embellishments to make it Egyptian-like, or Kanji-like, for us to wonder at G-d's amazing use of this language by His prophets of old.
That's why I'm glad G-d used an alphabet with His people to write Hebrew, otherwise it would take people years just to learn to read whereas the system the prophets used takes minutes to learn to read. Praise G-d for His easy access. If the ancients used an Egyptian/Khanji/etc type system to write, how many fewer people would have access to this miraculous language, Hebrew.

Praise G-d the bible is written in a simple, phonetic alphabet which my 3 year old daughter learned in a month and not in a system with hundreds of letters so we can convey "deeper mysteries" using pictures.

Faith comes by "hearing", reading is nice ... but the true power of the word is in speaking it.
I think we can agree on that.

 

[Mojo]

Short answer (as my long answer started before).
Yes, it's possible.
But we haven't found any writings that worked this theoretical way you are posing.
It would be very neato. There are alphabets that did have letters added so we get closer to that possibility but my point is that with the bible, even if we found some great ancient stone slab that had an example of 500 letters being used; we don't have the bible in that form so we would not be able to reverse-engineer it back to the beautiful depth of that ancient way of writing you are positing. Once the writing system shifted to simple alphabet like in English.
English letters once also had meanings to each letter; it was a picture but with our 26 letters there is no more depth to which letter we choose for a word than there is to the bible's 22 letters in Hebrew.

Hey, we agree! I actually think it dangerous to start looking for mysterious and mystical "hidden" meanings in scripture (numerology included). Scripture is what it is, and we must take it for what it is. I just thought the prospect of an unknown, ancient Hebrew alphabet intriguing. Outside the box thinking anyone?

 

[IshChayil]

Hey, we agree! I actually think it dangerous to start looking for mysterious and mystical "hidden" meanings in scripture (numerology included). Scripture is what it is, and we must take it for what it is. I just thought the prospect of an unknown, ancient Hebrew alphabet intriguing. Outside the box thinking anyone?

I tell you what, I also love the idea. This is part of what grabbed me with Egyptian, I got into it hoping to some day discover some great evidence supporting the Expdus,etc, but then the beauty of the writing system captivated me.
It would truly be neat if some day we found as you say some unknown Hebrew alohabet.
Like you I also dont out much stock in gemmatria, it's at most mildly interesting.

 

[IshChayil]

If you guys didn't see it, I finally got the image I made of Hieroglyphs to help explain working.
It took me some time to make this image so I'd appreciate if you see that post.

Here is the post (click the link)
Ancient Hebrew & related matters

thanks to @FollowingHim for helping me to get the picture embedded and how to link directly to a post. Very useful

 

[Verifyveritas76]

I've demonstrated this Brenner fellow and his lexicon are built on the sand that is universally rejected by Hebrew scholars and seminaries (Strong's concordance).

Sorry, one of the reasons why Ive held off on replying is that Ive been trying to verify this statement.

Now, I do understand the basis of the argument and agree that the Strongs was never intended to be more than a concordance as opposed to a lexicon. That is the only issue that I can find mentioned about the Strongs, that its dictionary is focused on the root words only, not the variations. However, to date, the only association that I have been able to corroborate is that Mr Benner has included an index of Strongs numbers in the back of his lexicon that is connected to his "Benner" numbers so that one can transition from the imperfect "sand" to something more substantial. As I also find this "help" in other study references, I fail to see how this automatically discredits Mr. Benner.
As best I can tell, Mr Benner's Ancient Hebrew Lexicon functions as a Lexicon. Is it imperfect? No doubt. If you can point me to one that is perfect I'd appreciate it.

I'm not aware of a single Hebrew Scholar who would mention strongs as a source for definitions. This Benner guy does. He bases his definitions on strongs and modifies or confirms if they are right based on this pictorial way of interpreting Hebrew. If you build your house on sand....(strongs)

If I am understanding you correctly, the reason that you aren't a big fan of Strongs is due to the definitions, not the concordance. If Mr. Benner modifies what is incorrect and confirms what is correct as you stated, I fail to see the issue. If on the other hand, your issue with Mr Benner is due to his interpretation of words based upon the pictographic that is a different issue.

 

[Verifyveritas76]

Is the Ancient Hebrew/Proto Semitic script the same as
Paleo Hebrew? No
Hieroglyphic? No
Cuneiform? No
Alphabetic? Obviously
Pictographic? Obviously. It's impossible to look at the alphabet without seeing the pictures
Mnemonic? Obviously
Symbolic? Obviously

Is Paleo Hebrew
Hieroglyphic? No
Cuneiform? No
Alphabetic? Obviously
Pictographic? In some cases that I am aware of like the "L". In the AH/PS it is a shepherds crook or staff. In the PH it utilizes the Egyptian serpent glyph. Why did they change the picture so severely between the styles? Or did they? What would be the connection between an Egyptian serpent and a shepherds staff? It was probably because of the story of Moses in Pharoah's court. I'm sure it's coincidental though. Nothing further to see there.
Mnemonic? ?
Symbolic? ?

It could be argued that any evolution or change of Hebrew script from that given at Sinai is a man made corruption of the written language given by God
It seems like the positions in the discussion revolve around the differences in the letter of the script versus the spirit of the script. Is there a difference? Apparently. Can the spirit be bound by the letter? I'm sure someone will try, but I also think it will be impossible to prove.

 

[Mojo]

"It could be argued that any evolution or change of Hebrew script from that given at Sinai is a man made corruption of the written language given by God."

Hmm. I like this thought. Interesting. It's been proposed that human DNA has been irreversibly corrupted from Adam on too. Sin and the Fall have a way of doing destructive things. Maybe Man corrupted Gods language too?

Still, all this linguistic stuff is beyond my pay grade, so please, please, please, nobody challenge me

 

[IshChayil]

*********short answer******
Sure it's possible but how does that help us?
We're still stuck with the Hebrew bible made of 22 letters, unable to express the deeper nuanced pictorial meanings that this missing writing system would convey.
So even if such a system existed as you suggest, and even if we found it, the current form of the bible would not have those deeper meanings captured in our textus-receptus.
Still we are stuck with 22 phonetic sounds, no choices to nuance words, and no special pictorial meaning to the words.
************* detailed illustrative answer *******
To allude to Egyptian again. there is a monosyllabic alphabet that is a subset of the Ancient Egyptian writing system which tourists get tricked into thinking if they just learn that wow they can read and write egyptian! You can get your name on a shirt, etc... (When I was there I asked them to spell my name in the way I wanted using biliteral and triliteral signs but they were only able to do the dumbed down, mono-alphabet "letters".)

It would be theoretically possible to take an Egyptian text, and convert it all over to the monosyllabic alphabet and then transmit the text that way.
(Coptic has been preserved in such a fashion; it is the latest form of Ancient Egyptian, written in derived Greek alphabet because the Christians rightfully didn't want phallus pictures and god pictures in translations of sacred writings).
Years later if we find that text written with the mono-letter alphabet (this is our bible analogy), and then we discovered later the deeper writing system but we did not have that text (i.e. bible) written in the deeper system; discovery of the deeper system would add no value to our rendering of the text because we would not be able to put that alphabetic rendering back into the deeper Rebus-principled / determinative categorized system (pictures at end of a word not read to classify the word) of writing.

The only hope for the scenario you describe would be to find some sort of Meta-Dead-sea scroll finding which had this hypothesized deeper writing (not the paleo-Hebrew Brenner stuff but an actual Egyptian like system like you are hoping for) with the biblical text PRESERVED in that system. Then coolio!!!! That would be totally awesome and the find of history.
OK I installed my Ancient Egyptian word processor and wrote the Hebrew word:
שלחן (shulchan) meaning table.
I wrote it 3 different ways using Egyptian Hieroglyphic signs, I could have made many, many more permutations but this should illustrate my point. The signs in red are not read-don't make a sign in the word but just help catogorize the word. These all say "Shulchan", the Hebrew word spelled in Egyptian. The last rendering on the far right is simply spelled alphabetically. This is the closest to what we have in Hebrew; no real choices, just gotta pick the monosyllabic letters that make those sounds.
View attachment 277
If you have trouble viewing the BIG pic (should be very big not small icon)
click this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3XC2HgsUayRQW14dUVVNHRpQTQ/view?usp=sharing

Hey folks, debunking the whole "Paleo Hebrew pictographic insight" error has now reached some famous scholars:
Dr. Michael Heiser (author of Unseen Realm) and Dr. Michael Brown (both have PHDs in Hebrew and old testament lit., etc)
If anyone didn't understand my attempt to clarify it, you may like Dr. Michael Brown's terse, 20 minute presentation better.
Famous Hebrew Christian scholar, Dr. Michael Brown: Paleo Hebrew Script Myth
Dr. Michael Heiser also debunks this method on his "Naked Bible Podcast" you can google it. Or you can check out his blurb over at paleobabble though it seems he's now pushing Dr. Brown's video Heiser still says some interesting things about the flawed method; he calls it "divination". Heiser writes:
This tragically misguided idea is, naturally, alive and well in Christian Middle Earth. It needs to be exposed for the nonsense that it is. Dr. Heiser's Paleobabble full blurb about it

If I find the Naked Bible podcast episode where he deals with it I'll post that up also.

Shalom

 

[Verifyveritas76]

I appreciated that video Ish, mostly because I like to be exposed to and examine from other perspectives. If you find the others, of course I’d like to view them also.

IMO, there were multiple logical leaps made in the dating and origins of the different alphabets. I do not believe that the Hebrew originated or borrowed from the Phonecian for its characters or meanings, rather the other way around. I didn’t find his sequence or logic convincing at all though it was informative of how the origins of the alphabet came to be.

IMO, this is another classic example of not being able to see the forest for the trees.

Peace, love and all the fuzzy stuff.

 

[IshChayil]

I appreciated that video Ish, mostly because I like to be exposed to and examine from other perspectives. If you find the others, of course I’d like to view them also.

IMO, there were multiple logical leaps made in the dating and origins of the different alphabets. I do not believe that the Hebrew originated or borrowed from the Phonecian for its characters or meanings, rather the other way around. I didn’t find his sequence or logic convincing at all though it was informative of how the origins of the alphabet came to be.

IMO, this is another classic example of not being able to see the forest for the trees.

Peace, love and all the fuzzy stuff.

Thanks for watching it Verify; I'm curious did you find my original argument demonstrating how ancient Egyptian COULD function this way more convincing than the Hebrew scholar's take? Determining if I should put my own stuff out there; kept procrastinating then when 2 famous scholars chimed in addressing it I thought "yeah, someone else handled this instead" but if the argument is less convincing than my own I may go ahead and invest the time.
Thanks in advance...
-shalom

 

[IshChayil]

IMO, there were multiple logical leaps made in the dating and origins of the different alphabets. I do not believe that the Hebrew originated or borrowed from the Phonecian for its characters or meanings, rather the other way around. I didn’t find his sequence or logic convincing at all though it was informative of how the origins of the alphabet came to be.
IMO, this is another classic example of not being able to see the forest for the trees.
Peace, love and all the fuzzy stuff.

So this came back to my mind and I think I need to address it. Let's agree that saying things like "they [masters of Biblical hebrew] can't see the forest through the trees" is a non-argument.
I don't mean any disrespect in saying that; I just want to point it out that sometimes sayings or phrases sound like they answer a problem or respond to a point made when really they don't.
I myself, a polyglot through countless thousands of hours of effort and travel, have put forth great effort in explaining the problems with this way of thinking linguistically about a language with only 22 letters in it's alphabet; I thought Dr. Brown did a decent job though his approach was different; Dr. Heisser touches on it in the Naked bible podcast as well calling the whole process "divination" which I'm tending to agree with now.

The sheer and simple fact I have come across is that nobody has ever been able to produce to me a single person fluent in Hebrew who espouses this system even; my goodness the fellow pushing it is an "Italian language" teacher who relies on strongs concordance. Perhaps anecdotally, everyone with whom I have interacted on this issue who defends the pictographic Hebrew thingy, are actually monolingual themselves. I don't mean that as an insult just we are discussing a language related issue so I would think more folks who actually have gone through the entire process at least one time of learning a foreign language would be on board with this; they are harder to dupe (like a Calculus teacher presenting a new theorem but all his followers are English majors who never took even Trigonometry would smell a bit funny).
Now, I have through much effort made a cogent argument using a language which did have the required thousands of symbols for such a system to exist (Middle Egyptian) to demonstrate the point that it can't be done in a system with just 22 letters and an almost 1 to 1 mapping of consonantal sounds to letters. 1 to 1 means the prophets don't get to make choices in how to spell a word; it's simply written as it sounds, period. It doesn't matter if the Phoenicians borrowed their alphabet from the Hebrews or vice versa...there just ... aren't ... any choices in spelling to be able to have pictographs in any way influencing word spelling. 22 letters, that's it. Heck, English has more expressive ability pictographically with our 26 letters. In addition, to date, we have never ever discovered any human language in which the writing system drove the creation of words in the spoken primitive language; the reverse is always true.
I know folks like pictographs, thats what sucked me into learning Middle Egyptian it's just so cool,
and it can be a lot more fun learning pictures than tedious Hebrew grammar but I'm gonna side with Dr. Heiser in this case who calls the whole Paleo-Hebrew pictographic assumptions "divination". I hadn't gone that far with it before but the more I mull it around in my head I think it may be true.
Assigning values to the text which just aren't there.

I did my best to not rely on authority but to really create examples for you guys (not just you VerifyV.) so you could process it yourself and see the reasoning to the absurdity of the pictographic Hebrew claims. Since nobody attempted to refute any of that I assumed this distraction had been dealt with. Adding the Dr. Brown video and the Dr. Heiser quote was just an attempt to seal the deal to save other folks time and money in an empty pursuit.

let's take that time and study the actual Hebrew language!
If anyone is serious pick up Jacob Weingreen's book "A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew".
Real language learning with real benefits; reading and understanding the text. Exercises with odd-numbered answers provided and a distilled grammar avoiding all the more advanced grammar not necessary for most parts of the bible.

peace love and harmony all
***** edit *****
for any who didn't read through the thread, please see my 2 posts why the pictographic Hebrew concept for spelling words doesn't work:
Why the Paleo-Hebrew pictographic interpretation doesn't work
An example of a system where this WOULD work, i.e. Ancient Egyptian with many signs (and why it won't work in small alphabetic systems like Hebrew)