AD INTELLEGENDUM
And they read from the book, from the law of God, clearly; and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading (Neh 8:8).
In biblical study, attention to the original languages of Scripture has always been essential. Saint Jerome, in his work of translating the Bible into Latin, devoted himself seriously to Hebrew. Living in the Holy Land, especially in Bethlehem, he sought to return as closely as possible to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, rather than relying only on earlier Latin versions translated from Greek.
To learn something of the languages of Scripture is therefore not merely a technical exercise. It is a way of approaching the human forms through which divine revelation has been received, written, copied, translated, and handed down. Learning a language in full is a difficult task, but becoming familiar with its writing system can be a first doorway into that larger tradition.
This chart presents two alphabets closely associated with the biblical world: Biblical Hebrew, the language of most of the Old Testament, and Biblical Greek, the language of the New Testament and of the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint.
The Hebrew side of the chart presents the consonantal alphabet of the received biblical Hebrew tradition. It does not include the later vowel-pointing system known as niqqud, which was added centuries after the biblical period to preserve pronunciation and reading tradition. This reflects an important feature of Hebrew writing: in its older written form, the consonants carried the main visible structure of the text, while vowels were supplied through reading and tradition.
The Greek side presents the alphabet in a majuscule, or uncial-style, form associated with early biblical manuscripts. Early Greek manuscripts of Scripture were commonly written in capital letters, often without the word spacing, punctuation, and lowercase forms familiar to modern readers. Some letters therefore appear different from their modern printed Greek forms. For example, sigma may appear as the lunate form C, a shape that also resembles the Latin letter C.
In broad terms, the Old Testament is associated with Hebrew and the New Testament with Greek. Yet the history of the biblical canon and its textual transmission is more complex than this simple division suggests. Some books received in the Catholic Old Testament, such as Tobit, Judith, and Maccabees, are preserved for the Church primarily through the Greek textual tradition and were not included in the later Jewish Hebrew canon. This does not weaken their canonical significance within the Catholic Church; rather, it reminds us that Scripture has been handed down through the living tradition of the Church as well as through textual history.
This work is not intended as a complete language-learning tool. It is a visual introduction: a way to see, at a glance, the scripts through which Scripture was written, transmitted, and read. The alphabets, examples, and notes are arranged not only for reference, but also as an invitation to approach the Bible as a written tradition shaped by language, memory, translation, and faith.
Available as a Printed Edition
Biblical Scripts is available as a printed poster through the KBM Charts online shop. It is designed for readers interested in Scripture, biblical languages, sacred typography, and the visual traditions of Hebrew and Greek writing.
