Ancient Hebrew Script

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Phil D.

ὁ βαπτιστὴς
There was an earlier brief thread here on PB about the discovery of a small lead tablet in Israel that has some very early inscriptions. There was also a recent discussion about possible evidence for a proto-Hebraic script in another recent thread, and there is actually an intriguing link between the two. A lot about the find is still open to question, but I find it interesting and credible enough. Anyway, I thought I would put together and post some highlights. (No links, since the online articles were very cluttered, including some with ads with inappropriate images.)


“Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse... thou shalt set the blessing upon Mount Gerizim, and the curse upon Mount Ebal.” (Deuteronomy 11:26, 29)​
Now an official curse has been found, engraved on a lead tablet that dates to the biblical age and had sat in the detritus of an excavation of Mt. Ebal for decades, the Associates for Biblical Research of Houston, Texas announced.​


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If the dating of the tablet to the Late Bronze Age – the 14th to 13th century B.C.E. – is accurate, it is the earliest such tablet by a century or two. Inscribed in proto-alphabetic writing also known as Sinaitic script or proto-Canaanite script, which dates to the Late Bronze Age, the hex text is early Israelite, the team claims.​
…Consisting of 40 ancient proto-Sinaitic letters on a lead sheet that was subsequently folded, and could only to be read by tomographic scanning, the inscription reads:​

“Cursed, cursed, cursed - cursed by the God YHW.
You will die cursed.
Cursed you will surely die.
Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.”

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…The hidden text was read with the help of tomographic scans. Given that it was thousands of years old, written in a proto-alphabet and folded up tight, “reading” and deciphering it was a huge labor of love. ABR undertook the effort in collaboration with scientists from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the epigraphers Pieter Gert van der Veen of Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and Gershon Galil of Haifa University; along with Ivana Kumpova, Jaroslav Valach, Daniel Vavrik, and Michal Vopalensky.​
...There are two stone altars at the site: a large early Iron Age i altar (circa 1200 b.c.), which was built over the top of a smaller, original Late Bronze Age ii altar (both excavated by the late Haifa University archaeologist Adam Zertal). The earlier, original altar is believed by Stripling to be Joshua’s altar and, together with the inscribed amulet, could date up to two centuries earlier than the larger altar—thus matching the biblical time frame for this event.​
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In discussions about early Hebrew we should keep in mind that the script that was used to write these things is called proto-Hebrew script, because it is not the script used to write Hebrew today, which derives from the Aramaic script that the Jews learned during their exile in Babylon. The language, however, is just biblical Hebrew, not "proto-Hebrew". By definition, in linguistics, the prefix proto denotes an unattested, reconstructed parent language. Biblical Hebrew, however, is quite well attested.
 
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