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The Letter of Aristeas insists that the Jews do not write in Syrian, or Aramaic, letters but in a script of their own. Josephus tells the same story in Antiquities of the Jews, but there Demetrius says the Jewish letters look like Syrian ones.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Letter of Aristeas 1:11
Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates
Pseudepigrapha, Hebrew Bible Expansions
'What is to prevent you from doing this?' replied the king. 'Everything that is necessary has been placed at your disposal.' 'They need to be translated,' answered Demetrius, 'for in the country of the Jews they use a distinctive alphabet (just as the Egyptians, too, have a special form of letters) and speak a distinctive dialect. They are supposed to use the Syriac language, but this is not the case; their language is quite different.' And the king when he understood all the facts of the case ordered a letter to be written to the Jewish High Priest that his purpose (which has already been described) might be accomplished.
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 12.2.1
Classical
And when once Ptolemy asked him, How many ten thousands of books he had collected, he replied, that he had already about twenty times ten thousand: but that, in a little time, he should have fifty times ten thousand. But he said, he had been informed, that there were many books of laws among the Jews, worthy of enquiring after, and worthy of the King’s library; but which being written in characters and in a dialect of their own, will cause no small pains in getting them translated into the Greek tongue: that the character in which they are written seems to be like to that which is the proper character of the Syrians; and that its sound, when pronounced, is like theirs also: and that this sound appears to be peculiar to themselves.
Date: 93-94 C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
“... Syrian. The form of the adjective Συριακῇ is rare, and it indicates Aramaic, as do other related forms. In Josephus’s account of Demetrius’s response, he uses the phrase Συρίων γραμμάτων (Syrian letters; Ant. 12.15). [...] Thus, the most straightforward interpretation of this section is that Egyptians have their own distinct letters/characters as do the Syrians. Judeans are thought to use Syrian characters (Aramaic square script), but they do not. Rather, they have their own style of letters. Is this perhaps a recognition on the part of Ps.-Aristeas that Jews in this period still wrote with what we now call paleo-Hebrew characters? ...”
Wright, Benjamin G., III
The Letter of Aristeas: ‘Aristeas to Philocrates’ or ‘On the Translation of the Law of the Jews’
(p. 121) De Gruyter, 2015
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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