Oldest Known Hebrew Writing

[gnostic]

This is what I found in today's papers.

&squo;Oldest&squo; Hebrew text found | Herald Sun

The oldest Hebrew text was found from broken pottery in a valley, said to be the location of where David battled Golaith.

The shard of pottery has been dated about 3000 years ago, the time of David.

What do you think of this discovery?

 

[Troublemane]

Very interesting! Its amazing they are able to read letters on pottery so old!

 

[Caladan]

Yossi Garfinkel, The archaeologist who presented the discovery (made south of Jerusalem) claims it may be an inscription in Hebrew, but that is yet to be fully determined. many archaeologists would say its too rush to make such a claim.
the alphabet used in the inscription is Proto-Canaanite from which the Hebrew alphabet is derived, but it will take a while to decipher all the words and get a picture of what language the inscription is in.

just for general knowledge, almost all known alphabet systems in use today are derived from Proto-Canaanite via the Phoenician (the latin alphabet, Greek alphabet, Aramaic, Arabic etc.).

 

[Riverwolf]

I saw a BBC article about it, too. Very interesting.

 

[gnostic]

Yossi Garfinkel, The archaeologist who presented the discovery (made south of Jerusalem) claims it may be an inscription in Hebrew, but that is yet to be fully determined. many archaeologists would say its too rush to make such a claim.

Naturally.

The newspaper that I 1st read only had a few line, but their website had a fairly bit more of the article. The article does say they have fully decipher the texts.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Yossi Garfinkel, The archaeologist who presented the discovery (made south of Jerusalem) claims it may be an inscription in Hebrew, but that is yet to be fully determined. many archaeologists would say its too rush to make such a claim.

While the site could be useful to scholars, archeologist Yisrael Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University urged adhering to the strict boundaries of science.

Finkelstein, who has not visited the dig but attended a presentation of the findings, warned against what he said was a "revival in the belief that what's written in the Bible is accurate like a newspaper."

That style of archeology was favored by 19th century European diggers who trolled the Holy Land for physical traces of biblical stories, their motivation and methods more romantic than scientific.

"This can be seen as part of this phenomenon," Finkelstein said. [source]

Precisely ...

 

[anders]

It would have been more interesting if the name David was written on it. But even so, it would have been no proof of a King David.