BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY: ANCIENT HEBREW TEXT ...

... found at ancient dig at Tel Zeyit, south and west of Jerusalem.

Unless told, most people would not know that the letters in the picture below read from right to left and are all upper case. Ancient Hebrew, like many others, had no lower case letters, no punctuations, and no chapter, page, or paragraph breaks. The images appear to be the Hebrew letters waw, he, het, zayin, tet ... leading researchers to believe it is a section of some child's alphabet.

If they are right, the stone bears the oldest reliably dated example of an abecedary - the letters of the alphabet written out in their traditional sequence. Several scholars who have examined the inscription tend to support that view.

Those dedicated to biblical research are owed a debt of gratitude for their hard work and remarkable discoveries. Ron E. Tappy, of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, the archaeologist directing the dig, believes ...

All successive alphabets in the ancient world, including the Greek one, derive from this ancestor at Tel Zayit. [...]

Frank Moore Cross Jr., a Harvard expert on early Hebrew inscriptions who was not involved in the research, said the inscription "is a very early Hebrew alphabet, maybe the earliest, and the letters I have studied are what I would expect to find in the 10th century" before Christ.

Yep, you read that right, that's 1,000 years before the birth of our Lord. This is an unusually well written article for the NYT; continue reading >>>>>

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Archaeology; Biblical archaeology; Christianity; Church history; Israel