Seeking the Garden of Eden Alphabet

by Estéban Trujillo de Gutiérrez

“The letterforms of the Sinatic and Ezra Hebrew alphabets bear little physical resemblance to one another, though they share the same twenty-two-letter format and have the same names for the letters.

Hence, the Sinatic Hebrew letter Alef transliterates with the Ezra Alef, the Sinatic Beyt with the Ezra Beyt, and so forth. Sinatic letterforms are basically built from the letters Alef and Ayin. Ezra Hebrew letter forms are built upon variations of the letter Yod.

Both alphabets have letters which overtly or covertly contain other letters, such as the Tav contained in the Sinatic Alef or the Beyt contained in the Ezra Alef (as described in the Sefer Bahir).

Unlike the Ezra alphabet, Sinatic does not have final letters, which were developed much later as a means of showing separation between words in crowded scrolls. The final letters became significant in the Ezra alphabet when given extended numerical value in gematria or qabalistic numerology.

The sudden appearance of the original Hebrew was paralleled several hundred years later by the sudden appearance of Brahmi Sanskrit in the Indus Valley.

Sinatic and Brahmi have many similar letterforms, and both were replaced by later alphabets claimed in present times to be the originals (i.e. Sinatic replaced by Ezra and Brahmi replaced by Deva Negari).

Some Qabalists and Tantrikas maintain that there is a parent alphabet, called the “Gan Aden Alphabet” (Garden of Eden), from which both Hebrew and Sanskrit are derived.

[ … ]

There is also said to be a Gan Aden Torah, an unbroken sequence of letters that may be broken into words and sentences in innumerable ways.

Hence, the written Torah is one such “translation” of the unbroken letter sequence, minus the letters and anusvara that were not included in the Hebrew alphabet.

A book called the Tiqunim HaZohar (“Perfections of Splendor”) discusses seventy ways of translating the first six letters of the Torah.”

–Daniel Feldman, Qabala: The Mystical Heritage of the Children of Abraham, 2001, pg. 57.