Question 4: Whether Ezra invented new Hebrew letters.
Question 4: Whether Ezra invented new Hebrew letters.
§ 115. (IV) The question arises: Did Ezra invent new Hebrew letters, leaving the ancient ones to the samaritans and giving the new ones to the Jews? This is affirmed by: (1) Some of the rabbinic scholars: Gerundensis and Rabbi Suthra, in the tractate sanhedrin. (2) Some of the ancient teachers of the Christian Church: Jerome, in the Prolog. galeat. and in his preface to the Books of Kings. (He was moved by the argument that the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet was similar to the Greek letter T and represented the shape of a cross, which he concludes from Ezekiel 9 in his commentary on this passage.) Today, however, the last letter of the alphabet seems to have no similarity to a cross. Therefore we have new letters. (3) Some of the more recent theologians: Bellarmine (Grammat., p. 11; De verbo Dei, bk. 2, c. 1), Benedictus Arias Montanus (De mensuris), Genebrardus (Chronol. ad ann. 3603, bk. 2), Drusius (Ad loc. difficil. Exod. 5, p. 163), Caspar Waserus (De numism. Hebraeor., bk. 2, c. 3, where he adduces the form of shekels marked with Samaritan letters), Whitaker (De scriptur., p. 102), Scaliger (Animadvers. ad Eusebium, p. 103), Calvisius, and others.
However, our blessed Luther ** (with whom Schikartus agrees, Mishpach hammelech, c. 2, th. 5, § 5) ** quite correctly denies this in his preface on Isaiah. He says, “Jerome was a good grammarian but a bad historian when he decided that the Jews lost their letters in the Babylonian captivity.” This judgment of Luther is confirmed by: (1) The authority and majesty of Holy scripture, for they persuade us to assert that the characters with which Moses and the prophets wrote the divine revelation were not lost but that the Jews always used those letters with which God Himself carved the Decalogue with His finger on the stone tablets and with which holy men of God wrote the canonical books.
(2) The trustworthiness of Ezra. Ezra is praised as the steadfast preserver and defender of the divine Law (Neh. 8:1). It is not at all likely, therefore, that he wanted to change anything in the characters of Holy Scripture.
(3) Historical truth. If Ezra had invented new letters, not he nor Nehemiah nor Josephus would have omitted that from their account of history. Rather, they would have noted this as something worth mentioning.
(4) The obviousness and clarity of the matter itself. The names of the letters we have today show they are truly Hebrew. They are Hebrew names, and their meanings fit their shapes well. In our Bibles, some verses of the Psalms and some chapters are distinguished according to the series of letters that are still used today, such as Psalm 25, 34, 37, 112, 119, 145; Proverbs 31, beginning with v. 10; and Lamentations 1. Therefore we still have the ancient letters.
(5) The religiosity of the Jews. Josephus testifies (Contr. Apion., bk. 1) how faithfully the Jews guarded their own literature, which did not change at any time. In fact, still today they are so superstitious that they immediately look for mysteries if one or another letter is longer or shorter because of the negligence of a scribe or transcriber. How, then, would they have allowed the whole Hebrew alphabet to be changed? The Masoretes did not at all dare to remove the errors that had crept into the codex of the Bible because of the carelessness of the scribes but merely noted a correction in the margin. Therefore who will believe that those ancients, who were far more observant of the divine Law, changed by human authority characters that came from the prophets, especially from a brutish hatred of the Samaritans?
(6) The impossibility of the deed itself. Who will allow himself to be persuaded of the following: That new, unheard-of characters, never seen until Ezra’s time, were invented? That Ezra foisted these upon all the Hebrew manuscripts, upon all Hebrew libraries, upon the canon of every Israelite codex of the Bible? That absolutely all the ancient copies of the canonical books were discarded? That a place for [the new letters] was made among all the Jews scattered throughout the entire world, as well as among the proselytes, the devout and pious monarchs and kings, though Ezra offered neither a divine mandate for this, his undertaking, nor documentation of a divine mandate? That he left no record of this matter for his descendants with which to bulwark and soothe their consciences in rejecting the old authentic letters and accepting new ones?
(7) The consequent absurdity. Unless we claim that these letters that we have today were used by the holy men of God who wrote down the divine revelation, the mysteries that both the Masoretic and also Christian interpreters seek in the shapes of certain letters will expire—for example, in the closed 
in the middle of the word in Isa. 9:6. In this example a mystery is acknowledged by Augustine (De civ. Dei, bk. 18, c. 39), Hieronymus de Sancta Fide (Contra Judaeos, p. 28), and Galatinus (De arcan., bk. 4, c. 19; bk. 7, c. 13).
(8) The perspicuity of reason. Just as Buxtorf, Tiberias, proves from the fact that the Masoretic scholars correct the errors of [vowel] points that they were not the authors of those points and accents, so also we can infer from the fact that the Masoretes correct the errors of letters that Ezra—who along with Nehemiah, Malachi, and other men of the Great Synagogue was the first author of the Masorah (as Elias Levita witnesses, preface to Rythm. Masoreth hammasoreth)—was not the inventor of the Hebrew letters that we have today.
§ 116. We shall be able to satisfy the arguments of the opposing side with little difficulty. The first is the authority of Jerome. However, we respond: (1) Jerome seems to have taken his opinion from 4 Ezra 4:23 and 14:21, which book is fable-filled and apocryphal. Some think that Jerome heard this from the Samaritans, who still today falsely claim that praise for themselves. (2) Jerome assigns the reason for the change to the hatred of the Jews against the Samaritans. Yet, instead, the Jews always worked hard to bring the ten tribes back to themselves. Finally, at the time of Ezra, pure heathenism flourished among the Samaritans. (3) Although we could attribute an invention of Hebrew letters to Ezra, yet the learned describe those as not new but shorthand elements.
The second argument is the disagreement of the letter 
[tav] with the shape of a cross.17 We respond. (1) At one time there were many shapes of crosses, as Lipsius, De cruce, shows in detail. The last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, 
, still reveals a shape of a gallows or cross. (2) The final letter of the Samaritans’ alphabet, which corresponds to the Hebrew 
, has absolutely no resemblance to a cross, as will appear clearly if you compare the shape of this letter (as Bellarmine describes it at the end of instit. Hebr.) with the shape of a cross. To be sure, Gretserus (p. 441) makes the exception that “it is not formed correctly today,” but that is pure conjecture. If the letters of the Samaritans are formed differently from the way they were at the time of Jerome, why would Bellarmine, in his Institutiones, have adduced this and not another shape to prove his opinion? No other author mentions that the original way of writing was changed among the Samaritans. (3) Scaliger himself (in Animadvers. ad Euseb., p. 109) acknowledges that Origen recites this as of someone else’s faith—namely, of a Jew—whom, though in error, Jerome followed.
The third argument is the conformity of Jewish shekels with Samaritan letters. But we respond. (1) The shekels generally found in the ruins of Jerusalem prove nothing else than that the Israelites sometimes also used Samaritan letters; however, nowhere do they succeed in proving that these letters are older than today’s. (2) Just as memorial stones cannot demonstrate the purity of any language, neither can those shekels marked with Samaritan letters. You see, it is also not evident whether coins of this kind were minted by public order or by private action. The latter is more probable because no high priest is mentioned on them. (3) Some scholars of antiquity today preserve shekels that are similar in shape and equal in weight to those that Benedictus Arias Montanus describes in De mens.; but those have inscriptions impressed in Hebrew letters. (4) The Samaritan letters seem to owe the beginning of their evolution partly to Hebrew and partly to Syrian script, and this applies to both capital and small letters. Sometimes some strokes are added or lengthened. Letters were cut into, inverted, taken out, or even transposed, as were the third and fourth letters, for example. The fourth letter in Hebrew is the third in Syrian. In the Syrian, capital beth is put in place of peh and peh in place of beth. Therefore as the Samaritan alphabet depends much on the Syrian, so the Syrian in turn depends much on the Hebrew, as one can determine by placing the alphabets side by side. However, in the case of some letters—such as alef, yod, tsade, and qof—there is a complete discrepancy. From this it is understood that our form of the Hebrew alphabet is the oldest and that all the rest came from it.