Psalm 145:18 The Hebrew Bible was a document meant to be heard rather than read. It came into being at the critical juncture between orality and literacy. When it was first written, the alphabet had only recently been invented. The world’s first alphabets were semitic.1 The word ‘alphabet’ itself comes, via Greek, from the first two letters of Hebrew script, aleph-bet. The biblical verb likro, which later came to mean ‘to read’, primarily means ‘to call’. The Hebrew name for the Bible, Mikra, means a summons, a proclamation.2 To this day, every Sabbath, and in a shorter form three times during the week, a section of the Pentateuch is read aloud from the handwritten Torah scroll in the synagogue. To understand the Bible you sometimes have to listen to it rather than read it. There is a fundamental difference between reading and hearing in the way we process information. Reading, we can see the entire text – the sentence, the paragraph – at one time. Hearing, we cannot.
