Oldest Hebrew Inscription Found
The biblioblogosphere is alive with discussion of the released photo, line drawing, and preliminary translation of what appears to be the oldest example of Hebrew writing to date. I found it originally through Evangelical Textual Criticism, but have since read quite a number of posts about it.
I’m afraid, however, that I must be missing something here with the claim that this will change the dating of Biblical texts by hundreds of years. Which ones and why? I already believed some sources of the Pentateuch dated from this period, and I don’t think oral transmission would be sufficient. In addition, following Milgrom’s dating for P & H, there is already a strong proposal that places extended texts 300-400 years later than this.
In other words, there were serious suggestions of written texts going back this far even before this discovery. Now it’s nice to have confirmation that such writing existed, rather than just speculation that it might/must have, at that early date, but I think it was a reasonable inference that it did.
At the same time, knowing that such things existed in this small form doesn’t really demonstrate that the longer literary texts existed at the same time, much as I’d like it to do so.
Perhaps I have simply always assumed written texts were quite possible substantially earlier than our earliest example of them. The question remains quantity and quality. Writing a small text on an ostracon and writing the final, redacted Pentateuch are substantially different things.
