Three scripts

New, published 17 October 2026. What else is new

In one sentence: Hebrew has been written in three hands, Paleo-Hebrew before the exile, the square script of every Hebrew Bible since, and the cursive Israelis write today, and all three are the same 22 letters in the same order.

אֱלֹהִים

𐤀𐤋𐤄𐤉𐤌

Elohim, "God", in square script, cursive and Paleo-Hebrew.

Paleo-Hebrew: the script of the kings

Israel's prophets and kings wrote in the old Hebrew script. Israel shared this alphabet with its neighbours on the coast, whom the Greeks called Phoenicians. The clearest example is carved in the rock under Jerusalem. Hezekiah, the Bible records, "made the pool and the conduit and brought water into the city" (2 Kings 20:20, ESV; 2 Chronicles 32:30). In 1880 an inscription was found inside that tunnel, cut where its two teams of diggers met. It is written in Paleo-Hebrew. It dates from about 700 BC and is now in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums.

Unicode encodes this script as "Phoenician". That is why the Paleo-Hebrew on this site is drawn with a Phoenician font: the letters are the same. The Samaritans still write their Torah in a descendant of it.

Square script: the letters of the Bible

After the exile, Jews took up the script of Aramaic, the Persian empire's official language. They shaped it into the square letters printed in every Hebrew Bible. The Talmud remembers the change and ties it to Ezra:

"Initially, the Torah was given to the Jewish people in Ivrit script, the original form of the written language, and the sacred tongue, Hebrew. It was given to them again in the days of Ezra in Ashurit script and the Aramaic tongue." (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 21b, William Davidson translation, Sefaria, CC BY-NC)

Ashurit, "Assyrian", is the square script's traditional name. The Talmud's account agrees with what inscriptions and scrolls show. The square letters came in from the east after the exile.

By Jesus' day the square script was what a Jew read in the synagogue, and it shapes one of His sayings:

✝️ Matthew 5:18 (ESV)

18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.

The iota, ἰῶτα (iōta, G2503), is the smallest Greek letter. Here it stands for the smallest Hebrew one, yod (י), a single stroke in the square script. The "dot", κεραία (keraia, G2762, literally "a little horn"), is most likely the small stroke that tells one Hebrew letter from another, the way ד differs from ר. God keeps His word down to the smallest mark on the page, and Jesus came to fulfil every stroke of it (Matthew 5:17).

The scrolls that kept God's name in the old letters

The Dead Sea Scrolls are written in the square script. Yet scribes in several of them switched to Paleo-Hebrew for one word: God's name, יהוה. Counted in the scroll transcriptions of Martin Abegg, James Bowley and Edward Cook (as published in the ETCBC's Text-Fabric edition, CC BY-NC):

Scroll	What it is	יהוה in Paleo-Hebrew
11Q5	The Great Psalms Scroll	164 of its 165 occurrences
4Q57	A copy of Isaiah	82 of 83
1QpHab	The Habakkuk commentary	all 8
11Q2	A copy of Leviticus	all 7

Across all the scrolls, 286 of the name's 4,843 occurrences are in Paleo-Hebrew, in 15 scrolls. A handful also write El, "God", אֵל, the same way. The scribes never say why. The likeliest reason is reverence. God gave Moses His name "forever" (Exodus 3:15), and the scribes set it apart in the letters Israel's fathers had used. No reader could miss it or read it carelessly. That reason is an inference. The practice itself is what the scrolls show.

Cursive: Hebrew by hand today

Square letters take many strokes. Over centuries Jewish scribes and letter-writers developed faster hands. The cursive taught in Israeli schools today grew out of the handwriting of the Jewish communities of Europe. Israelis read the square script in print and write the cursive by hand. To read a note, a whiteboard or a birthday card, a learner needs both. Several cursive letters look little like their printed forms: compare א, ג and ק in the table below.

All 22 letters in three hands

Name	Square	Cursive	Paleo-Hebrew
Alef	א	א	𐤀
Bet	ב	ב	𐤁
Gimel	ג	ג	𐤂
Dalet	ד	ד	𐤃
He	ה	ה	𐤄
Vav	ו	ו	𐤅
Zayin	ז	ז	𐤆
Het	ח	ח	𐤇
Tet	ט	ט	𐤈
Yod	י	י	𐤉
Kaf	כ ך	כ ך	𐤊
Lamed	ל	ל	𐤋
Mem	מ ם	מ ם	𐤌
Nun	נ ן	נ ן	𐤍
Samekh	ס	ס	𐤎
Ayin	ע	ע	𐤏
Pe	פ ף	פ ף	𐤐
Tsadi	צ ץ	צ ץ	𐤑
Qof	ק	ק	𐤒
Resh	ר	ר	𐤓
Shin	ש	ש	𐤔
Tav	ת	ת	𐤕
The cursive here is set in Gveret Levin, an open-licensed handwriting typeface; individual
handwriting varies as much in Hebrew as in English.

Practise them

The Writing Sheets print each script on A4 with guide lines, a model letter and grey letters to trace, and a sheet of the names of God to copy in all three.