The first word you read is not the first word you read because when you read Hebrew, a little like reading a hypertext, you are not really reading. You are jumping across abysms of alternatives.

The alphabet was only invented once. This occurred in the South Sinai in the 14th century BCE or so. All other alphabets derived from it. Even the Korean alphabet invented in the fourteenth century by the king was inspired by his knowledge of the phonetic alphabet and his desire to imitate it. There are other kinds of scripts that have had independent origins, but they are not alphabets. The Chinese, the Mayans, the Sumerians all invented different forms of pictograms, for instance. Typically, pictograms require thousands of separate elements or characters. To be literate in Chinese you must command 6000 characters. The entire script contains about 60,000. There are also syllabaries, which have a different character for every syllable (beh, bah, bee, bo, boo, bi, by, etc. each require their own sign). As a result, syllabaries often require between 200 and 600 characters (the number of consonantal sounds multiplied by the number of vowel sounds). Sanskrit and ancient cuneiform Linear B (Akkadian) are examples of syllabaries.

We use the alphabet largely because the Phoenicians exported it from ancient Israel/Canaan to Greece. The Phoenicians received it in the 11th century BCE from the Hebrews who came out of Egypt, crossed Sinai, and marched on Canaan.

The Phoenicians started capitalizing on the alphabet almost as soon as they got it, perhaps two or three centuries after Semite slaves working the turquoise and copper mines in the South Sinai invented it as a form of argot or graffiti for their subculture, which they carried with them north on their exodus from Egypt and their march up to and conquest of Canaan.

Even before the eventual improvement - one might say perfection - of the Hebrew/Sinaitic alphabet through the addition of vowels, the aboriginal Hebrew alphabet was one of the most powerful, mind-bending, culture-creating technologies ever deployed, a technology so powerful that we are still using its more perfected version three thousand years later. Although humans have many times improved the systems used to deliver the alphabet - from clay tablets to papyrus to printing press to electromagnetic pulses sent down fiber optic wires or through microwaves, the basic invention still retains its shape.

The Jews connected it to the essence of their metaphysical and cultural institutions. The alphabet was very likely the instrument of their liberation from Egypt by Moses the Alphabet Bringer. It forged their identity as a coherent culture as they wandered the desert for a generation. Slaves out of Egypt, nationless, alone with their alphabet, virtually their only possession, the Children of Israel and this crude phonetic script fed on each other. With it, the culture summoned a new kind of god and codified a new set of laws. The first work of letterature was the Ten Commandments and then the Torah, written in Hebrew. They emerged together from the desert a generation later as a powerful new force.

The Phoenicians, as cosmopolitan merchants and traders, tinkered with the alphabet. They saw its potential as a fabulously plastic instrument for communication and for lubricating commerce. They wrote the words so that the first line read right to left, the second left to right, the third right to left, or up and down, down and up, or as a form of embroidery around images. The seafaring Phoenicians sailed the sea of script pragmatically and efficiently. Without wasted eye motion, they would begin the next line where the eye remained from reading the previous rather than tacking the gaze all the way back across the horizon. They carried it from the eastern coast of the Mediterranean to Greece, an event commemorated in the myth of Cadmus. The Greeks called this Phoenician method of writing in alternating directions boustrephedon (meaning, like the ox plows a field). They eventually added vowels, a tremendous event, and abandoned boustrephedon in favor of reading from left to right, around the sixth century BCE.

Of the eventual improvements to the alphabet, only the addition of vowels was apparently phonetic; that is, only adding vowels changed the relationship between how the script looked and how it represented speech. The other changes - writing left to right, placing spaces between words, and adding diacritical marks - were visual at first glance. But it is worthwhile pausing here and remembering that historical moment when the first genius in the slave mines of Pharaoh hit upon the idea of representing speech by marks.

The Jews were loathe to alter the construction of Hebrew and its tradition because of its intimate, one might say essential and inextricable, tie to their sacred institutions. Three thousand years later, Jews still read the Torah three times a week in unvowelled script, right to left.