No, no, I’m not talking about getting suckered on the black market. I’m talking about intentionally buying replicas of antiquities. Last year at the Oriental Institute Museum in Chicago, I purchased a resin replica of the laws of Lipit-Ishtar, mostly for the purposes of showing my students what a cuneiform tablet might look like. The other day, I decided to take the plunge and order a few replicas from two different suppliers who do business online.

First, I ordered a couple of items from the LMLK Shop. From LMLK, I ordered replicas of the Gezer Calendar and Lachish Ostracon #3. My main interest in purchasing these items is to be able to enhance my Hebrew class in 2007–2008 with some amateur paleography. (The Gezer Calendar may really be Phoenician rather than Hebrew, but functionally this makes no difference to reading the text.) I chose Lachish Ostracon #3 rather than one of the other Lachish ostraca, or the Yavneh Yam Ostracon, because of its author’s reference to his own literacy, which is an interesting piece of the puzzle in constructing a picture late 7th-century/early 6th-century Judean society. When I placed my order, I did not realize the happy coincidence that the LMLK Shop is run by G. M. Grena, who reads Higgaion on comments occasionally on my posts.

G. M. referred me to another online replica shop, at the Institute for Bible & Scientific Studies. Exactly what approach this Institute takes to the Bible and scientific studies I don’t know, and I didn’t spend a lot of time poking around to find out. I just went to the replicas shop. From IBSS, I purchased two sets of bullae replicas and a replica of the Nash Papyrus. Again, my intention for these is primarily to use them as visual aids in Hebrew 330–331 and Hebrew 502 this coming fall, spring, and summer.

I haven’t yet received these items, and I haven’t returned to Malibu from Buenos Aires anyway. After I do, I’ll comment on the quality of the reproductions.

After the biblioblogging session this morning, I went out to grab a bite to eat and then retired to my hotel room to blog about the blogging session and mentally prepare myself for my presentation in the afternoon. In the 4:00 session of the Use, Influence, and Impact of the Bible Consultation (I think I have that name right), I led off the session with my presentation on Ghiberti’s and Brunelleschi’s bronzes of the aqedah. The presentation was well received, and by fortuitous circumstance, it was timed almost perfectly. Hopefully, this will become a small part of a much larger rezeptionsgeschichtliche project.

From that session, I hightailed it upstairs, swapped my computer for my jacket, and went back downstairs for the session on the Tel Zayit inscription. For starters, you might see Jim West’s reproduction of Joseph Lauer’s summary of recent coverage. You might also want to see my one substantive post on the inscription thus far, and be sure that you look at Tyler Williams’ posts here and here. I’m sorry that we don’t have really good pictures to show of the inscription; those on Tyler’s blog are about the best I’ve seen on the Internet. Naturally, the session tonight featured better pictures.

Tonight’s session on the Tel Zayit inscription featured presentations by Ron Tappy (leader of the Zeitah dig) and leading epigrapher Kyle McCarter. Both were, it seems to me, appropriately cautious. Tappy gave an overview of the Tel Zayit excavations, and showed detailed maps and photos of the place where the inscribed stone was found. Tappy emphasized that the stone was clearly found in a secondary usage but a primary context. That is, after the stone had served some other purpose—Tappy’s preferred understanding seems to be that it was a mortar used for grinding small herbs or some such—it was stuck in the wall c. 3,000 years ago, and stayed there until the Tel Zayit excavators found it.

McCarter’s presentation focused on the paleographical significance of the inscription. In this talk, McCarter characterized the inscription as an abecedary. In McCarter’s opinion, the inscription was the work of a good scribe, but the current condition of the stone gives the impression of carelessness. The inscription lists the standard twenty-two letters known to us from the Hebrew alphabet, although McCarter did not characterize the scribe’s language as Hebrew. He went through a detailed comparison of the Tel Zayit abecedary’s letter forms with those on the Gezer calendar, showing that most of the letter forms seem relatively more archaic in comparison with the Gezer letter forms, the sole exception being the mem, which is much more angular (”more advanced”) than the mems in the Gezer calendar. McCarter suggested that the letter forms have features suggesting a South Canaanite development from the Phoenician base alphabet. In the abecedary, four letter pairs are reversed, such that the alphabet reads (in square script, since there is no “Tel Zayit inscription” font yet)

א ב ג ד ו ה ח ז ט י ל כ מ נ ס פ ע צ ק ר ש ת

instead of

א א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת

Some of these inversions are known from other sources, but some, especially the lamedh-kaph sequence, are not.

There were also a few very brief remarks from Bruce Zuckerman, mostly warning that anything at this stage is very preliminary and the team isn’t even really through photographing the inscription to their satisfaction, much less analyzing it. Marilyn Lundberg was also present, but did not make any comments.

Both Tappy and McCarter stayed away from “interpreting” the inscription in their prepared remarks, though they were urged to do so, in different ways, during the Q&A. Under questioning from Hershel Shanks, McCarter suggested that the abecedary was a practice piece by the scribe, that at least some of the reversals were simply mistakes, and that an X-shaped mark larger than the letter forms might be a sign of the scribe’s anger at messing up; Zuckerman suggested that it might be a kind of erasure mark, and that a curved mark visible beneath the X might be a lamedh. Neither Tappy, nor McCarter, nor Zuckerman answered Shanks’s questions about “What does this mean?” Someone I didn’t know asked a question about whether the alphabet was inscribed with the rock in situ or whether it was inscribed before the rock was placed in the wall. Tappy expressed his opinion that, due to the position of other rocks around the inscribed one, it would be virtually impossible for someone to have inscribed the alphabet on the stone in its current position.

If Tappy and McCarter were careful with their interpretive comments, audience members were not. Ziony Zevit opined that the abecedary demonstrated “a writing tradition in the tenth century” which therefore refuted “the revisionists.” Larry Stager, who was chairing the session, agreed, and called it “the second nail in the coffin” of “the revisionists.” In my opinion, “jumping the gun” is a charitable estimation of these comments. Of course, one would really need to ask Zevit and Stager who “the revisionists” are, in their minds, but we can take some guesses. The thing is, whether or not somebody in tenth-century Zeitah could write the alphabet—and remember, all we have is one abecedary inscribed, presumably, by one person—has nothing substantial to do with the question of whether there really was a “united monarchy” or when the biblical texts were written, how long a period of oral tradition might lie behind them, and so on. Anson Rainey followed up by insisting that it was “perfectly clear” to him that it was a practice text by a neophyte scribe. According to Rainey, scribes practiced writing in sets of two or three letters at a time, sometimes in reverse, and this scribe hadn’t quite learned his lessons perfectly. Rainey also insisted that the rock, once placed in the wall, was not meant to be seen, because it would have been plastered over; Tappy replied that no indications of plastering were found on that wall (if I understood his response correctly). This is the second time in two days I’ve heard Rainey make a comment after someone’s presentation, and on the basis of those two experiences, I am about ready to jump to the conclusion that Rainey tends to jump to conclusions. If there were tenth-century scribal schools training folk like whoever inscribed the Tel Zayit abecedary, how on earth can Rainey possibly know how they trained? So far as I know, the only evidence for “scribal exercises” in a southern Canaanite (including proto-Hebraic) script are the Gezer Calendar and the Tel Zayit abecedary—if these items are scribal exercises, which remains uncertain (though plausible, certainly in the case of an abecedary).

One more thing needs to be mentioned. In Tappy’s presentation, he explained that the Tel Zayit excavations are beginning to suggest that the Iron I city there might have been much larger than the Zeitah team previously estimated. At the end of the session, Stager expressed his hope that it’s not that large, because in his mind this would diminish the significance of the find—presumably because literacy is more to be expected the larger the settlement grows. While I assume that Stager would follow the evidence wherever it actually leads—certainly, nobody could deny the acreage of the Iron I city once it is fully excavated—I found the invocation of “wishes” quite striking. Stager’s comment suggests that there are those who want Zeitah to yield evidence of literacy in a small village. It is always the case that scholars should be scrupulously cautious with the data, but when scholars expresses wishes for what the data might show, this should be a yellow flag as the investigation moves forward.

The Tel Zayit abecedary is a very interesting and, for paleographers, exciting find. It almost certainly provides evidence for the letter forms of a tenth-century (or ninth-century, depending on whose pottery chronology you use) southern Canaanite alphabet derived from Phoenician forebears. It tells us that at least one or two people in the settlement that later became one of the layers of Tel Zayit could read and write. That’s pretty cool stuff. But it’s a long way from what some people might want it to be, and really has no bearing on the question of when the biblical texts were written or whether the stories they tell are historically reliable. Those decisions will have to be made on the basis of arguments and evidence coming from other quarters.

After I posted my photograph of my desk area, Jim West asked whether I could show a closer-up picture of the painting on the wall. That painting, entitled “Babylon Falls to Chaos: Jeremiah 50-51,” was done by Ginger Dillon, one of my students at Milligan College, for a class project several years ago. Ginger has now given her permission for me to post a close-up shot. Please don’t blame Ginger for my poor photography skills or any distortion of the colors caused by the digital camera or computer screens.

Here’s the whole painting:

And here’s a detail of the lower right-hand corner, featuring someone who I take to be Jeremiah: