Neil Silberman blogs on the Qeiyafa Inscription

Silberman enters the fray. Where there is smoke, there is fire, we say in English. On the other hand, as we say in Italian: tutto fumo e niente arrosto.*

*Tutto fumo e niente arrosto means all smoke and no roast. It refers to roasting to the point of overcooking the roast and filling the air with smoke. In the end you have nothing but smoke.

Comments

[ed cook]

John, as I said before when you presented a "consensus" view of the inscription -- there can't be a consensus view on this ostracon until the photos are published (as they now are) and everybody has a crack at it. (See the site at http://qeiyafa.huji.ac.il/ostracon.asp for a variety of views.) My own preliminary take is first, bewilderment at the oddity of the ductus -- e.g., the stance of the aleph occurs 3 different ways, the shin is sometimes horizontal, sometimes vertical. What is going on here? This doesn't look like the product of a literate society. Almost every word can be controverted.

[JohnFH]

Ed,

Yes, my attempt to present a "consensus interpretation" based on agreements between the first four epigraphers who looked at it was not cautious enough. Still, everyone agrees that the inscription contains the phrase אל תעש and the vocable שפט. That's already enough reason to refer to the language of the inscription as (proto-) Hebrew as opposed to (proto-)Phoenician or (proto-) Aramaic.

The observation you make is important. On the basis of this inscription, I am tempted to revise the usual characterizations of the Tel Zayit and Izbet Sarteh abecedaries, often seen to be the products of unlearned individuals. Not quite; like the author of this inscription, it is more likely that they wrote in a period in which normalization of many things had not yet occurred. It's not that normalization existed that they failed to learn. There was as yet no normalization. These inscriptions come from a transitional period.

Very rough analogies include inscriptions written "as the cow ploughs" in ancient Greek and spelling variation in English until recent times.

Normalization requires a political context of a certain kind that did not yet exist in this period. I was trained under Frank Cruesemann in Bielefeld to think of pre-monarchic Israel as an example of what ethnographer Christian Sigrist called "regulierte Anarchie." The setup ended up getting co-opted and transformed beginning with Saul and David, but it's a long drawn-out process.

I would think this coheres with Seth Sanders' thesis (see his Invention of Hebrew) which places the onset of the development of a national script and a national literature in the 9th cent BCE, with the flowering thereof in 8th to the 6th centuries BCE.

The article I think Hebraists need to read is a famous one by Ramsey MacMullen, "The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire," AJP 103 (1982) 233-46; plus E. A. Meyer, "Explaining the Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire: The Evidence of Epitaphs," JRS 80 (1990) 74-96.

[phil_style]

"This doesn't look like the product of a literate society"

99% of today's handwriting gives me the same impression! ;)