Earliest Israelite inscriptions

A discovery of an ancient 10th-century BCE inscription in the Elah Valley in Israel drew worldwide media attention recently. The CJN featured the story on its front page on Jan. 14.

One of the reasons for this interest is that some scholars believe that writing was not widespread in ancient Israel before the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian captivity. It is widely believed that the books of the Bible were not brought together until the sojourn in Babylon, during the sixth century BCE.

However, there is evidence of the use of writing in the land even before the Israelite period (after 1200 BCE). A number of examples have been found in pre-Israelite Canaan at Shechem, Gezer and Lachish. At the site of Ugarit, in what is now coastal Syria, an entire archive in which an alphabetic script, written with cuneiform symbols, was found. The cuneiform symbols had been invented in Mesopotamia some 2,000 years earlier.

Indeed, some of the language used in the Ugaritic documents has a strong resemblance to biblical Hebrew. The archive dates to the latter part of the Bronze Age, just before Israel emerged on the scene, and just prior to the earliest mention of Israel outside of the Bible.

The earliest extra-biblical inscription mentioning Israel is the Merneptah Stela (a stela is a formal inscription on stone, usually commemorating an important event). It dates to the reign of Pharaoh Merneptah, the son of Ramses II, around the end of the 13th century BCE, with the date usually given as 1207 BCE. It states that there was a people called Israel living in Canaan at that time.

As for the earliest alphabetic inscription written in Hebrew, one has to go back to the 12th century BCE. At a number of sites in Israel, inscriptions have been found that show there was an alphabetic script in use in the land adopted by our ancestors.

At Khirbet Radanna, an early Iron Age site, evidence of alphabetic writing has been found inscribed on a pottery handle. It was there that one of the earliest examples of the so-called Israelite “four-room house” was found. The presence of the four-room house is usually a strong indicator of Israelite settlement.

Khirbet Radanna is just north of Jerusalem, near the Arab village of Deir Dibwan. It was a site that I was involved in excavating in 1968, under the leadership of Prof. Joseph Callaway. Callaway was a pupil of the legendary English archeologist Kathleen Kenyon, who dug at both Jericho and Jerusalem. She played an important role in the archeology of the Holy Land by introducing her excavation techniques to the area. Because of his meticulous fieldwork, which he had learned how to do from Kenyon, Callaway’s important discovery was not seriously challenged.

At Izbet Sartah, near Aphek, on the coastal plain near the source of the Yarkon River, an abecedary, dating to the 12th century BCE, the period of the Judges, was found. An abecedary is a teaching aid that was used for practising writing the alphabet. In this case, experts have said the abecedary belonged to a middle-aged individual who was learning his or her letters.

The site itself contains one of the earliest Israelite settlements on the coastal plain, and the person practising his or her aleph-bet was probably an Israelite. It shows that one is never too old to learn.  

This brings to mind what the great Harvard scholar Frank Cross once told me. He said that the alphabet democratized knowledge.

It was this democratization of knowledge that would play a role in the ideals of universal justice that our prophets have given humankind. Their words would become a beacon to the world, and they were written in an alphabetic script.