The writings delivered to the Israelites by Moses, are more ancient than any others now known.

In the thirty-first chapter of Exodus, it is said, that God "gave unto Moses, upon Mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, _written with the finger of God_." And again, in the thirty-second: "The tables were the work of God, and the writing was _the writing of God_, graven upon the tables." But these divine testimonies, thus miraculously written, do not appear to have been the first writing; for Moses had been previously commanded to write an account of the victory over Amalek, "for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua."-- _Exod._, xvii, 14.

This first battle of the Israelites occurred in Rephidim, a place on the east side of the western gulf of the Red Sea, at or near Horeb, but before they came to Sinai, upon the top of which, (on the fiftieth day after their departure from Egypt,) Moses received the ten commandments of the law.
20.

Some authors, however, among whom is Dr.Adam Clarke, suppose that in this instance the order of the events is not to be inferred from the order of the record, or that there is room to doubt whether the use of letters was here intended; and that there consequently remains a strong probability, that the sacred Decalogue, which God himself delivered to Moses on Sinai, A.M.2513, B.C.1491, was "the first writing _in alphabetical characters_ ever exhibited to the world." See _Clarke's Succession of Sacred Literature_, Vol.

i, p.24.