Which came first: Hebrew or Proto-Canaanite?

As I understand it, mainstream scholarship contends that the Hebrew alphabet descended from Phoenician, which descended from a script known as Proto-Canaanite (see the Wikipedia entry for that).

Isaac E. Mozeson in The Origin of Speeches: Intelligent Design in Language argues that the Hebrew alphabet predates and is actually the source for the others. Sometimes Mozeson’s reasoning can be hard to follow, but in chapter 3, “The Aleph-Bet as Keyboard of Creation,” he presents a cogent argument as to why the Hebrew might seem to have come later: the boxy-shaped Torah letters simply were not used as much and were used for the most part by a relatively small number of scholar-scribes:

… Judean kings and most commoners could only read Hebrew from a variety of nonsacred Semitic scripts. However poor the Hebrew literacy level was in the Judean kingdom’s time, it was far worse for the non-scholars in subsequent centuries. It is not conjectured that few Judeans could read or write, but that popular Semitic scripts had replaced the Edenic Aleph-Bet for a long time. For a long enough time, apparently, for scholars to assume that Ezra’s prehistoric Aleph-Bet was new and the result of “evolution.”

The miracle of Hebrew’s survival over the millenia, with relatively minor changes, owes much to the fact that it became only a language of prayer and textual study, and not one of daily conversation. Nobody wrote love letters or laundry lists in the sacred Hebrew Aleph-Bet. The scholars who copied Scriptural scrolls and other apocryphal documents became a small, esoteric group who were charged with maintaining the authentic, boxy Aleph-Bet.

ARK — 3 March 2009