The Bible states that before the flood there was only one language. When God spoke the universe into existence he used a language. When he spoke to man he used the same language. When the first man, Adam, spoke to the animals (giving them their names) he used the same language. Adam then taught it to his wife Hhava (Eve) and his children. His children then taught it to their children and down through the generations until the Tower of Babel, at which time God came down and confused their languages.

It is interesting to note that the Tower of Babel ocurred around 3,000 BCE, the same time that the Sumerian and Egyptian cultures arose. The Hebrews, Sumerians and Egyptians all used the same style of pictographic writing. Is it possible that all of these pictographs come from an original proto-alphabet prior to the Tower of Babel?

Let us look at the Hebrew letter "aleph," the first letter of the Hebrew Alephbet, to see the evolution from Hebrew to our own English alphabet.

Approximately 4,000 years ago the original picture for the letter aleph was the head of an ox. About 3,000 years ago the picture was simplified and around this time the Greeks adopted this alphabet for their own use and the Hebrew/Semitic aleph became the Greek letter alpha. The Greek alpha continued to evolve into its modern form. The Romans then adopted the Greek alphabet which is the alphabet used today to write English.

Let us look at the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the letter beyt, which follows a very similar progression.

The ancient cultures did not have a separate numbering system as we do, but instead used their alephbet to double as their numbering system. The aleph represented the number 1. The Arameans of Babylon also used the same Semitic/Hebrew alphabet but evolved separately from Hebrew. The first nine letters of this Aramaic/Hebrew alphabet eventually became our numbers one through nine. Below is the progression of the letter aleph and beyt from their original pictograph to our numbers one and two.