was given originally by God and through Jesus Christ, hence the one speaking (through an angelic representative) at times is God himself and at other times Christ Jesus. (Rev. 22:8) Thus Revelation 1:8, RS, says: “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God [AT; “Jehovah God,” NW], who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” Although the preceding verse speaks of Christ Jesus, it is clear that in verse 8 the application of the title is to the “Almighty” God. In this regard Albert Barnes in Barnes’ Notes on the New Testament observes: “It cannot be absolutely certain that the writer meant to refer to the Lord Jesus specifically here . . . There is no real incongruity in supposing, also, that the writer here meant to refer to God as such.”

The title occurs again at Revelation 21:6, and the following verse (21:7) identifies the speaker by saying: “Anyone conquering will inherit these things, and I shall be his God and he will be my son.” Inasmuch as Jesus referred to those who are joint heirs with him in his kingdom as “brothers,” not “sons,” the speaker must be Jesus’ heavenly Father, Jehovah God.—Matt. 25:40; compare Hebrews 2:10-12.

The final occurrence of the title is at Revelation 22:13, which states: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” It is evident that a number of persons are represented as speaking in this chapter of Revelation; verses 8 and 9 show that the angel spoke to John, verse 16 obviously applies to Jesus, the first part of verse 17 is credited to “the spirit and the bride,” and the one speaking in the latter part of verse 20 is manifestly John himself. The “Alpha and the Omega” of verses 12-15, therefore, may properly be identified as the same one who bears the title in the other two occurrences: Jehovah God. The expression, “Look! I am coming quickly,” in verse 12, does not require that these aforementioned verses apply to Jesus, inasmuch as God also speaks of himself as “coming” to execute judgment. (Compare Isaiah 26:21.) Malachi 3:1-6 speaks of a joint coming for judgment on the part of Jehovah and his “messenger of the covenant.”

The title “the Alpha and the Omega” carries the same thought as “the first and the last,” and it is appropriately applied to Jehovah God in an unlimited way as being the first of all things, their Beginner, and also the Almighty whose power is capable of bringing all things to a successful end or realization.—Compare Isaiah 44:6.

ALPHABET

This English name of the system of letters employed to set down in writing the phonetic sounds used in speech derives from the first two Greek letters alʹpha and beʹta, which, in turn, come from the Hebrew ʼaʹleph and behth.

ORIGIN

There are many theories as to the origin of the alphabet; the Sumerian and Babylonian cuneiform the “Hittite” hieroglyphs, and the Egyptian forms of writing all being suggested as possible sources. However, a prominent authority, Dr. David Diringer, states in his book The Story of the Aleph Beth (1958, p. 31): “It is now generally agreed that all existing alphabets, and those no longer used, derived from one original alphabet.” On page 39 he quotes G. R. Driver as saying: “It was one, and only one, of the gifts of the Semites to mankind,” and then states: “It was this alphabet which became the ancestor of all alphabetic scripts the world has known.”

With regard to archaeological discoveries, among the earliest preserved examples of the alphabet, according to the methods of dating used by archaeologists, are the inscriptions discovered at Serabit elKhadem on the Sinai Peninsula, believed to be from the nineteenth or eighteenth century B.C.E., the Ugaritic clay tablets found at Ras Shamra in Syria, containing a cuneiform alphabet and assigned to the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries B.C.E., and the inscriptions at Byblos in Phoenicia, considered as dating from about 1100 B.C.E. The Phoenician letters are nearly identical with those of the early Hebrew alphabet, whereas those from Sinai have considerable variation. The earliest preserved Hebrew inscriptions include a fragmentary inscription from Lachish ascribed to the twelfth or eleventh century B.C.E., the so-called “Gezer Calendar” (see CALENDAR) thought to be of the eleventh or tenth century B.C. E., the beautifully written Samarian ostraca recorded in cursive style or running hand and ascribed to the reign of Jeroboam II (844-803 B.C.E.), and the Siloam tunnel inscription evidently from the reign of King Hezekiah (745-716 B.C.E.). It is not until about the third century B.C.E. that a wealth of material of early Jewish scripts becomes available.

On the basis of these discoveries the tendency is to view the Phoenician and Sinaitic alphabets as antedating the Hebrew. This, of course, does not of necessity logically follow, and in the above-mentioned publication Dr. Diringer asks the question: “Is it possible that the ancient Hebrews who presented the world with the Bible and Monotheism, also gave it the Alphabet? The possibility certainly exists.” (The Story of the Aleph Beth, p. 37) The relative scarcity of ancient Hebrew inscriptions does not argue against this, inasmuch as the Hebrews were not given to the erection of monuments or the making of plaques memorializing the feats of kings and heroes, as were other ancient peoples. The climate and soil of Palestine likewise are not such as contribute to the preservation of papyrus writings, as is the case with the land of Egypt.

The Hebrew order of the letters of the alphabet is clearly indicated in acrostic writings in the Psalms (34, 111, 112, 119 and others), Proverbs 31:10-31, and Lamentations chapters 1-4 (except for a reversal of the letters ʽaʹyin and peʼ in chaps. 2-4). In these writings the letters of the alphabet appear in consecutive order as the initial letters of each successive verse, section or stanza. The Hebrew alphabet, then as now, consisted of twenty-two letters, all consonants, and probably represented some twenty-eight sounds. It appears that it was not until about the sixth century C.E. that a system of signs was developed to indicate vowel sounds. Some seven different “vowel points” were employed, singly and in combination, by the Jewish scholars known as Masoretes, to represent the Hebrew vowel sounds.

PICTOGRAPHIC-WRITING THEORY

The common theory is that the Hebrew alphabet derived from pictographic writing. This theory seeks support in the fact that the names for the Hebrew letters are often the same as or similar to the Hebrew names of certain objects, ʼaʹleph meaning “bull,” behth meaning “house,” giʹmel being similar to the Hebrew ga·malʹ or “camel,” and so forth. However, difficulties arise in following this through with all the letters, and the supposed similarity between the form of the letters and the suggested meaning of the name is often such as requires considerable imagination. Thus, while some believe that the letter giʹmel originally represented a camel (or a camel’s neck), others suggest that it originally pictured a “throw stick”; some, that daʹleth represented a door, others, perhaps originally a fish; zaʹyin, a weapon or perhaps an olive tree; tehth, a serpent or perhaps a basket, and so forth. It is, therefore, interesting to note Dr. Diringer’s statement on page 40 of The Story of the Aleph Beth, where, after showing that the phonetic value of each Hebrew letter corresponds to the initial sound of the name applied to it he points out: “It would be wrong to assume that [this] necessarily indicates the use of pictorial representations of the objects whose names the letters bore: in other words, there is no clear evidence that the symbols were originally pictographic.” Thus, in teaching someone the English alphabet the teacher might say that A stands for “apple,” B stands for “boat,” C stands for “cat,” and by that merely mean that the sound value of the letter is represented by the initial letter of the following word, not that the letter’s form resembles in any sense the shape or characteristics of the object identified by that word.

There is no sound basis for the theory that the alphabet is the result of a gradual evolution through pictographic, ideographic, or syllabic writings. Although the ancient Egyptians eventually used a number of their phonetic signs to stand for specific consonants, they never did isolate them as a distinct alphabet, and they continued to use their ideograms and syllabic phonograms until the time of the Common Era. Thereafter they adopted the Greek alphabet. There is no history of a pictographic writing independently developing into an alphabet. In addition to the case of the Egyptian writing, other peoples, such as the Mayas, evidently employed pictographic writing for millenniums, with no evolution into an alphabet. Till this day the Chinese have not developed an alphabet from their originally pictographic writing.

LATER DEVELOPMENTS

Referring to the one original alphabet, Dr. Diringer shows that other peoples or civilizations later developed their own variations of that basic alphabetic script which variations, with the passing of time, eventually came to be almost unrecognizable in their relation to other members of the same family (as well as to the original script). He adds: “Thus, the Brahmi script, the great mother-script of India, the Korean alphabet, the Mongolian scripts are derived from the same source as the Greek, the Latin, the Runic, the Hebrew, the Arabic, and the Russian alphabets, although it is practically impossible for a layman to see a real resemblance between them.”—The Story of the Aleph Beth, p. 39.

Following the captivity in Babylon the Aramaic style of letters was adopted by the Jews and from this developed the square style of letters characteristic of the modern Hebrew alphabet. Nevertheless, there is evidence indicating that the early Hebrew script continued to be used in postexilic times.

The Greek alphabet is derived from the Semitic alphabet. The Greeks made a valuable addition to it in that they took the surplus letters for which they had no corresponding consonants (ʼaʹleph, heʼ, hheth, ʽaʹyin, waw, and yohdh) and employed these to represent the vowel sounds a, e (short), e (long), o, y, i. Of the two styles of Greek writing the Eastern and the Western, the latter became the source of the Latin alphabet and, in turn, of our English alphabet.—See the individual letters by name; also WRITING.

ALPHAEUS

(Al·phaeʹus) [perhaps, leader or chief]

1. The father of the apostle Matthew Levi, the tax collector.—Matt. 9:9; Mark 2:14.

2. The father of James the Less, the ninth listed of the twelve apostles. (Matt. 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13) Many authorities are supported by tradition in the general belief that Alphaeus was the same person as Clopas (John 19:25), which would also make him the husband of “the other Mary.” (Matt. 27:56; 28:1; Mark 15:40; 16:1; Luke 24:10) Either a variation in pronunciation of the root word, or the individual’s having had two names, a common thing in those days, would explain this difference.

ALTAR

[Heb. and Gr., “place of sacrifice”].

Basically, a raised structure or place on which sacrifices are offered or incense is burned in worship of the true God or of another deity. The first mention of an altar occurs after the flood when “Noah began to build an altar to Jehovah” and offered burnt offerings thereon. (Gen. 8:20) The only offerings mentioned prior to the Flood were those of Cain and Abel and, though it is likely that they did so, it is not stated whether they used altars or not.—Gen. 4:3, 4.

Abraham built an altar at Shechem (Gen. 12:7) at a point between Bethel and Ai (12:8; 13:3), at Hebron (13:18), and also at Mount Moriah, where he sacrificed a ram given him by God in substitution for Isaac. (22:9-13) Only in this last case is a sacrifice specifically mentioned as being offered on these altars by Abraham. However, the basic meaning of the Hebrew word indicates that offerings were likely made in each case. Isaac later built an altar at Beer-sheba (26:23, 25) and Jacob built altars at Shechem and at Bethel. (33:18, 20; 35:1, 3, 7) These altars made by the patriarchs were doubtless of the type later mentioned by God in the Law covenant, either mounds of earth or platforms made up of natural (unhewn) stones.—Ex. 20:24, 25.

Following the exodus from Egypt, Moses first constructed an altar following the victory over Amalek, naming it Jehovah-nissi (Jehovah is my signal, or, perhaps, Jehovah is my refuge). (Ex. 17:15, 16) At the making of the Law covenant with Israel an altar was built by Moses at the foot of Mount Sinai and sacrifices were offered up on it. Blood from the sacrifices was sprinkled on the altar, on the book and on the people, thereby validating and putting in force the covenant.—Ex. 24:4-8; Heb. 9:17-20.

TABERNACLE ALTARS

With the setting up of the tabernacle, two altars were constructed according to divine pattern. The altar of burnt offering (also called the “altar of copper” [Ex. 39:39]) was made of acacia wood in the form of a hollow chest, apparently without top or bottom. It was about seven and a quarter feet (2.2 meters) square and about four and a third feet (1.3 meters) high with “horns” projecting from the upper four corners. All its surfaces were overlaid with copper. A grating or network of copper was placed below the altar’s rim “down within,” “toward the center.” Four rings were placed at the four extremities near the grating, and these appear to be the same rings through which the two copper-sheathed acacia-wood poles were passed for carrying the altar. This might mean that a slot was cut through two sides of the altar allowing for a flat grating to be inserted, with the rings extending out on both sides. There is considerable difference of opinion among scholars on the subject, and many consider it likely that two sets of rings were involved, the second set, for insertion of the carrying poles, being attached directly to the outside of the altar. Copper equipment was made in the form of cans and shovels for the ashes, bowls for catching the blood of the animals forks for handling the flesh, and fire holders. All of this was made by Bezalel and Oholiab.—Ex. 27:1–8; 31:2, 6, 8, 9; 38:1-7, 30; Num. 4:14.

This copper altar for burnt offerings was placed before the entrance of the tabernacle. (Ex. 40:6, 29) While it was of relatively low height, thus not necessarily requiring a means of approach, for ease of handling the sacrifices placed within it, the earth may have been raised around it, or there may have been a ramp leading up to it. (Compare Leviticus 9:22, which states that Aaron “came down” from making offerings.) Since the animal was sacrificed “at the side of the altar to the north” (Lev. 1:11), the “place for the fatty ashes” removed from the altar was to the E (Lev. 1:16), and the basin of copper for washing was located to the W (Ex. 30:18), this would logically leave the S as the open side on which such a means of approach might be placed.

Altar of incense

The altar of incense (also called the “altar of gold” [Ex. 39:38]) was likewise made of acacia wood, the top and sides being overlaid with gold. A border of gold ran around the top. The altar measured about 17.5 inches (44.5 centimeters) square and about 2 feet 11 inches (89 centimeters) high, and also had “horns” extending out from the four top corners. Two gold rings were made for the insertion of the acacia carrying poles overlaid with gold, and these rings were placed underneath the gold border on opposite sides of the altar. (Ex. 30:1-5; 37:25-28) A