The Lowdown on the Qeiyafa inscription

Two introductions to the significance of the inscription are must reading/hearing. That of Seth Sanders, author of The Invention of Hebrew, here. That of Chris Rollston, here. Here is a pdf with background information, photos, properly accredited I believe, and a starter bibliography (courtesy of Raymond van Leeuwen). Everything is up-to-date. Below the jump, some reflections on the reflections of Sanders and Rollston.

 

Seth Sanders and Chris Rollston emphasize the need to keep one’s options open. For example, the date of the inscription: a (late) 11^th cent. bce date works better from the point of view of script and script presentation, and may work better in terms of historical reconstruction as well. However, a(n early) 10 cent. bce date is not to be excluded (though Rollston tends in that direction). A few sequences are reasonably clear, אל תעש   , עבד, שפט, andמלך , but many others are not.

It is fair to say that neither Sanders nor Rollston work with miminalist or maximalist assumptions. Based on all kinds of considerations they do not and could not detail or even touch on in brief comments, both think of Israel, Saul, and David as historical entities about which we can say a variety of things with some plausibility, but little certainty.

Unless one thinks the poems in Judges 5 and 2 Samuel 1:19-27 are fabrications – not many scholars do – one is going to try to contextualize anepigraphic and epigraphic finds from the land of Israel of the relevant time periods in the light they provide based on a critically informed reading thereof.

I think Rollston goes too far when he states that "an equally good case can be made that [the Qeiyafa inscription] is Phoenician." That doesn’t make sense unless he is suggesting that the reading אל תעש is controvertible. Any student of NWS languages, I submit, upon being told that a text includes the following sequences: אל תעש, עבד, שפט, andמלך , will tell you that the text in question is most likely Hebrew or Moabite. After being told that the text was found on a site in the Judean Shephelah, the answer becomes: most probably, Hebrew.

Rollston however makes many excellent points. For example:

Obviously, Israel was some sort of a “state” at this point. . . . Moreover, I have no doubt that literacy was present during the 10th century as part of the fledgling Southern Levantine states (Israel, Moab, Ammon). However, I am very confident that this literacy was confined to a particular group of elites (i.e., scribes).  This is actually a fairly common tenet among scholars of Northwest Semitic (and the Hebrew Bible)

To which I would add: too often nevertheless the Tel Zayit and Izbet Sarteh abecedaries are thought of as products of unlearned individuals. Rather, like the author of this inscription, it is more likely that they were trained individuals who 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 period in which a lot of things in terms of writing habits were not yet normalized.

Normalization requires a political context of a kind that did not yet exist in this period. I was trained under Frank Crüsemann in Bielefeld to think of pre-monarchic Israel as an example of what ethnographer Christian Sigrist called "regulierte Anarchie." That’s a fair reading of Judges 5 (Lawrence Stager is on more or less the same page). The setup ended up getting co-opted and transformed beginning with Saul and David, but it was 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. In a sense Seth ha scoperto l’aqua calda "discovered hot water" as we say in Italian, but he develops the thesis carefully and with considerable élan. Note: this thesis, however plausible to a great many scholars,  does not rise above the level of a working hypothesis. It does not solve all the problems of the history of the literature found in the Tanakh / Old Testament. Nonetheless, it points in the direction of a plausible resolution of many of them.

To pick up on Seth Sanders’ reflections, the key question is: “What occasioned this meeting between a proto-Hebrew speaker and a proto-Canaanite writer?” Such a meeting appears to be what the Qeiyafa inscription attests to. In this sense, I think Rollston is overly cautious.

With respect to understanding the ramifications of the fact that the vast bulk of Iron Age inscriptions in epigraphic Hebrew date to the 8^th to 6^th cent 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.  

 

UPDATE: Seth Sanders promises to return to the subject here.

 

Comments

[Duane]

John,

A couple of minor observations: First, if all we had of the Izbet Sarteh ostracon was the abecedary, I might agree that it was the work, not the very good work because of the double q issue and not the order issue, but the work of a (partially) "trained individual." However, we do have the totally incomprehensible five lines above the abecedary. If you want to attribute them to a trained individual, take your best shot!

Second, the presents of the like phrase אל תעש in the Qeiyafa inscription and in Biblical Hebrew is impressive. But without some additional strong support, I wouldn't want to bet the farm on the Qeiyafa inscription being Hebrew on this as the strongest isogloss. Ugaritic attests ʿšy and according to Bennet, 136, the word išwi, apparently a cognate, occurs in the Ma'lulu Aramaic dialect, both meaning "make." Many might think this last example is too late to be relevant and, to be sure, there are several paths by which the root could have arrived in Ma'lulu but I say, better late than never.

[JohnFH]

Duane,

Your points are well-taken.

But I'm not sure they shift the balance of probability away from the notions that (1) the Itzbet Sarteh ostracon was written by a trained individual, part of a class of people at the time who were probably not numerous at all (I don't know what to make of the other lines, but I'm not willing to attribute that to the fact that author was unschooled); (2) the Qeiyafa ostracon is most likely (proto-)Hebrew.

[Duane]

John,

Actually, I tend think the Itzbet Sarteh ostracon was the work of a beginning student. I base this on the "content" and not the orthography. Lemaire suggested that the student was studying at Aphek and not Itzbet Sarteh. If Lemaire's take on this turns out to be the case, then the language the student was learning to write was likely Canaanite, if I can call it that, rather than Hebrew. Some time ago I posted my own wild speculation on the Itzbet Sarteh ostracon.

[JohnFH]

Interesting idea. It certainly cannot be excluded. I wonder, however, if we can really distinguish between Canaanite and Hebrew in the relevant time period.

[Duane]

John,

Yeah, distinguishing might be a problem. But telling Phoenician from Aramaic is not so hard in generally contemporary inscriptions (not taking into account the issues with Deir 'alla). If you believe Rainey, early Hebrew along with Moabite and Ammonite should be much closer to Aramaic than Phoenician. I have my problems with Rainey's position but I don't think him wrong in many details. It's his conclusion that bothers me. On a somewhat related topic, if we look at the local dialect column of the Aphek cuneiforms vocabulary texts we get a rather mixed messages on the one hand we see a form like mu-mi, water, (Aphek 8151/1: 1') and the very next line has ye-nu, wine. Then, if Rainey's reading correct, check out du-uš-bu, (long?) u class vowel and all, for honey in line 5' (The Akkadian column is extant would have likely read di-iš-pu). At some point, a š and the b metathesis took place in Hebrew. I assume this reflects the local Aphek dialect and not some other dialect but even if it doesn't the large questions it raises are still valid. So I think there might have been quite recognizable differences, the consonant compliment among them (Hebrew likely having a greater range than Phoenician), between Hebrew and Phoenician. But the linear writing system(s) obscures many/most of these differences. Why couldn't these people write in a syllabic script? The other thing is that local dialects of which the Aphek dialect may be an example seem to have been everywhere in this time period.

[JohnFH]

Jeepers, Duane. You know an awful lot about these things. Make sure you comment on Seth Sanders' blog when he posts more on this. In the meantime, you might want to take a look at his book The Invention of Hebrew to begin with.