FROM
ISRAEL
THE OLDEST KNOWN HEBREW WRITING

In our Winter 1977 issue we gave a short report on the discovery of the earliest known example of Hebrew writing. The text scratched on a piece of pottery (an “ostracon”), has now been published, giving further details on this important discovery.

The Site

The ostracon was found at a site call Izbet Sartah in the Ephraimite hill country in central Israel, some three km east of Tel Aphek (for a report on the excavations at Tel Aphek, see the Summer 1976 issue of Bible and Spade, pages 90–97). Two brief seasons of excavations were carried out in February and August of 1976 under the direction of Moshe Kochavi of the Tel Aviv University. The excavations revealed three occupational strata. Stratum III, the earliest, consisted of dwellings and adjacent silos which the archaeologists dated to the 12th century B.C. This was followed by the most important period, Stratum II, consisting of a typically Israelite “four-room house,” extending over more than 200 square meters in the center of the settlement, with smaller buildings at the periphery. The exterior walls of the central building were one meter or more in thickness. In the open space between this building and the surrounding houses, dozens of circular stone-lined silos, dug down to bedrock, were discovered. The four-room house had been built on the ruins of Stratum III, and after a short period of abandonment at the end of Stratum II it was rebuilt by the people of Stratum I. The finds of Stratum II date its abandonment to the middle of the 11th century B.C. and the renewed settlement of the upper stratum (Stratum I), of very short duration, to around the end of the 11th or the beginning of the 10th century B.C. After the Stratum I occupation, Izbet Sartah lay deserted and forgotten until Israeli archaeologists began probing her secrets.

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Survey map of Aphek region.

Biblical Connections

Izbet Sartah is thus seen to be an Israelite site of the period of the Judges. As the nearest Israelite neighbor of Aphek, lying on the road

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leading up to Shiloh, the site is ideally located for a mustering center for the Israelite forces who went forth to battle the Philistine armies assembling at Aphek and thus is probably to be identified as the Eben-ezer of 1 Samuel 4:1. The founders were no doubt Ephraimite families who pushed westwards to the edge of the hill country and settled the site in the 12th century B.C. To move further west into the Yarkon basin where Aphek was located, would have meant an encounter with the Canaanites and later the Philistines, who were in control of the plains.

In the great confrontation between Israel and Philistia described in 1 Samuel 4 in about 1050 B.C., the settlement was probably abandoned (the end of Stratum II). After a generation or so the Israelites returned to rebuild the site (Stratum I). They do not seem to have persevered in their reoccupation of the site, however, for it was soon abandoned again. Perhaps this was a result of David’s having conquered the Yarkon basin (2 Samuel 5:17–25), thus opening up attractive valley sites with abundant water and fertile fields.

The Ostracon

In the August 1976 season one of the excavators, Arieh Bornstein, a student of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, was peering into Silo 605 when he noticed a fragment of pottery on which there seemed to be writing. He pointed out the faint traces to others, but no one believed him. Bornstein was undeterred, however, for he retrieved the fragment anyway, and took it to Kochavi. Whatever was incised on the sherd was so fine and so indistinct that Kochavi himself could not be sure whether he was looking at scratches or writing. He conceived the idea of getting some American volunteers at the tell, who knew not one letter of Hebrew or other Semitic language, to copy what they saw. Incredibly, they produced an early Hebrew or Canaanite alphabet! Further help was given by Prof. David Owen of Cornell University who passed on to the Israelis his method for photographing semi-illegible clay tablets. The ostracon proved to have five lines of incised letters.

Unfortunately, Silo 605 cannot be assigned with certainty to any one of the three strata at the site. Silos 611, 607 and 610 abut onto the four-room house, and therefore belong to Stratum II; Silo 513 and the northwest pillar of the house cut into the earlier silos of Stratum III. Since most of the silos seem to have been dug in the earlier two strata, Silo 605 was presumably also dug at the same time, i.e. between ca. 1200 and 1050 B.C. On paleographic grounds (style of writing), however, the date can be more precisely determined as ca. 1200 B.C.

The ostracon itself, roughly trapezoidal in shape, comes from the

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“Four-room house” and adjacent silos.

body of a large storage jar. Its average thickness is eight mm and its maximum height and width are nine and 16 cm, respectively.

Eighty-three letters in five lines were incised on the sherd with a very fine-pointed instrument (the width and depth of the incisions do not exceed 1/10 mm). Line one has ten letters; line two, six letters; line three, six letters; line four, 28 letters; and line five, 22 letters. The fifth and bottom line has relatively large letters and deeper and bolder incisions than the other lines; it is also the straightest line. These characteristics, as well as its contents, indicate that it was the first line to have been incised on the sherd, perhaps as an abecedarian for a copying exercise. The next line to have been written (most likely by a different hand) is apparently the fourth line from the top. The longest line on the ostracon, it curves in a shallow arc; its final letters on the righthand side are twisted around between the end of line five and the edge of the sherd. Line three, the shortest, may best be understood if we assume that lines one, two, and three were incised in that sequence, after lines four and five were already written, thus leaving little space for line three,

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The ostracon.

Drawing of ostracon.

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the very last to have been incised. Its six letters therefore had to be crowded into the narrow space remaining between the beginnings of lines two and four. The bottom part of the sherd is blank, leaving an equidistant margin between line five and the bottom edge of the sherd. This margin, as well as the downward curve of the righthand side of line four, indicates that both the righthand and bottom edges are the original borders of the ostracon and were not broken off after the sherd was inscribed. Presumably the other two edges are also the original borders.

The Content

So what does this message from the past have to tell us? The only line the translators were able to decipher in a meaningful way is line five. This line has 22 letters, beginning with the first letter of the Semitic alphabet, alef, at the left and ending with the last letter of the Semitic alphabet, taw, on the right. This is unusual, for later Hebrew, from the Geyer calendar (tenth century) on, was written from right to left. In spite of several minor deviations (and/or errors) from the conventional alphabetic order, there is no doubt that this is the earliest Proto-Canaanite abecedary that has so far come to light. The translators were not able to extract any word sense from the remaining four lines. The most likely explanation for these lines is that they were nothing more than a writing exercise of a school boy or apprentice writer trying his hand at copying the 22 letters of the abecedary from the bottom row.

Importance of the Inscription

The abecedary at the bottom of the ostracon is the earliest to appear in the corpus of Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, and together with the copying exercise of the upper lines roughly doubles the amount of paleographic material available from the period. This ostracon provides a wealth of data likely to cast new light on old problems, such as the evidence it supplies supporting an early date for the adoption of the Semitic alphabet by the Greeks and the means by which it was transmitted to the Aegean (the Philistines?). By demonstrating the existence of a written tradition and original Hebrew alphabetic order already at the beginning of the 12th century B.C., the inscription necessitates a re-evaluation regarding the general level of literacy during the period of the Judges and the extent to which the Canaanite linear script was adopted by the Israelites independently of any intermediacy of the Phoenicians.

(“An Ostracon of the Period of the Judges from Izbet Sartah,” by Moshe Kochavi, Tel Aviv Vol. 4, No. 1-2, 1977, pp. 1-13; Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 40, No. 1, March 1977, p. 6.)

Bible and Spade 7:2 (Spring 1978)