November 2005

Ah, Merneptah!

It seems that Joe has set off a little flurry of blogging by his tantalizing posting of a few reconstructed hieroglyphics from the Merneptah Stele. (Note to any readers who happen not to know this: Merneptah is spelled Merenptah in some sources. Not being an Egyptologist, I am not sure of the reason for this, but I assume it is no more significant than the alternate spellings Nebuchadnezzar/Nebuchadrezzar in the Tanakh.) Already Jim and blogging newcomer Kevin (hi, Kevin, and welcome to the blogosphere) have weighed in, with a terse rejoinder coming back from Jim to Kevin. My, my, what Joe Cathey can accomplish just by posting one little picture. I’m glad it wasn’t a picture of a firearm.

Anyway, regular readers of Higgaion surely knew that I couldn’t keep quiet on this one. So here I go again, spending too much time on blog posts and not enough on offline responsibilities.

First, some basics about the Merneptah stele for those few readers of this blog who might never have heard of it before. (That better not include any of my students, because if you “haven’t heard of the Merneptah stele before,” that would mean you were sleeping through at least two class sessions of Religion 101 and not reading your homework.) The Merneptah stele is a stone obelisk bearing, on one side, a “victory hymn” praising the military accomplishments of Merneptah, king of Egypt c. 1212-1202 BCE or, by some reckonings, c. 1224-1211 BCE. The text of the stele dates its inscription to the fifth year of Merneptah’s reign, thus c. 1207 or perhaps c. 1219 (not c. 1230 as Jim wrote, but that is probably not a terribly significant difference; by the way, Jim also misspelled the name of the excavator, Flinders Petrie, as “Flanders Petrie,” though this too has little significance for interpreting the importance of the stele’s text). The majority of the text is a paean (probably overblown) to Merneptah’s victories over his Libyan enemies (rebels?), but a few lines are devoted to reports of victories in the Levant. In this section of the text appears the line, “[the people-group] Israel is laid waste; his seed is no more.” My bracketed phrase “[the people-group]” supplies the potentially important sense of the determinative symbol used to introduce the proper name “Israel” in this phrase. English translations usually render the last words “his seed is not,” but I have rendered it as “its seed is no more” simply to make it clear that Merneptah’s speechwriter is not saying “his seed is not [laid waste].”

In brief, in a relatively insignificant line (for the purposes of the text) in a self-laudatory victory hymn, Merneptah (that is, the speechwriter speaking for Merneptah, I suspect) claims to have soundly defeated a people-group called “Israel,” which he encountered in the Levant, somewhere in the vicinity of what we loosely call “the land of Canaan.” This much is, I think, pretty well unassailable.

By the way, let me add that I think the argument that “seed” should be taken literally as plant seeds, and thus the line should be interpreted as referring to food stores, is a non-starter. It is lexically possible that the Egyptian word prt could refer to plant seeds. Contextually, however, Merneptah’s boast that “Israel’s seed is no more” parallels “Hurru has become a widow.” Merneptah’s propagandist is using imagery of bereavement; thus, “seed” should be interpreted as “offspring” (as most interpreters have taken it here).

The big question is how much connection there is between Merneptah’s “Israel” and the Bible’s “Israel.” Please allow me to attenuate that statement slightly. It’s perhaps better to state the question in terms of much connection there is between Merneptah’s “Israel” and the archaeologically attested Iron Age II kingdom of Israel. Then, as step 2 (or later), the question of the relationship between the archaeologically attested Iron Age II kingdom of Israel and the biblical story of Israel can be addressed. In my judgment, insisting on the archaeologically attested Iron Age II kingdom of Israel as a mediating step between the Merneptah stele’s “Israel” and biblical “Israel” is quite necessary to avoid both undue confusion and undue leaps from the evidence.

Merneptah’s Israel is a people group apparently living somewhere in the vicinity of Merneptah’s Canaan (which many interpreters identify specifically with Gaza), Ashkelon, Gezer, Yenoam, and Hurru (a term used by the Egyptians for Syria, generically). This geographical region stretches from the coastal plain to Syria, northwest of the sea of Galilee. If Merneptah’s “Canaan” is to be identified with Gaza, as a number of interpreters propose, then these names seem to follow a southwest-to-northeast pattern. Some scholars have argued that “Israel” and “Hurru” function as general terms for the region (see, e.g., Hoffmeier’s introduction to the Merneptah stele in Hallo and Younger’s Context of Scripture and Hjelm and Thompson’s article in JSOT 2002—with very different ramifications drawn from the argument). Either way, Merneptah’s Israel is a people group living in the vicinity between the Philistine coastal plain and the Aramean highlands. The identification of Yenoam is uncertain, but I usually see it identified as a town up near the sea of Galilee. This might suggest that Merneptah’s “Levantine itinerary” (so to call it) mentions three southwestern toponyms and three northeastern toponyms (with due allowance for the determinative that introduces “Israel”) as a way of rhetorically encompassing the entire region.

This general vicinity is, of course, where the archaeologically demonstrable Iron II kingdom of Israel flourished. With our present body of evidence, we cannot prove that there is a direct continuity between Merneptah’s Israel and, let’s say, Omri’s Israel. However, I don’t think anybody seriously argues that Merneptah’s Ashkelon was in a different site from Iron II Ashkelon, or that Merneptah’s Gezer was somewhere other than the location of Iron II Gezer. So if we find Merneptah talking about a people group called “Israel” c. 1210, and we find the Assyrians talking about a kingdom called “Israel” c. 850 (I am thinking of the Kurkh Monolith), then it seems reasonable to think there is a continuity between these two entities, just as there is little doubt or dispute over a continuity between Merneptah’s Ashkelon and Tiglath-Pileser III’s Ashkelon (mentioned in a tribute list from the Calah Annals, see ANET p. 232; this text seems to be omitted from COS). If the Ashkelon and Gezer analogies hold for Israel, then the Merneptah stele would provide a degree of evidence—I would not call it decisive, but I would not write it off—that a people group called Israel lived somewhere within roughly the same territory occupied by the Iron II kingdom of Israel, and that this Israel stands a pretty good chance of being somewhat continuous with the Israelites of the Iron II kingdom.

Of course, if Merneptah’s Israel were to cease to exist, that would be a big problem for any theory of continuity between Merneptah’s people of Israel and the Iron II kingdom of Israel. Along these lines, Jim West writes:

Scholars who wish to find the “historical Israel” here usually have to make quick riddance of the second part of the line which says that Israel was, for all intents and purposes, exterminated. So, they suggest that it is hyperbole and in this they may well be right. The curious thing, as an aside, is that they take the mention of Israel so terribly seriously and then immediately discount what the stela says. Isn’t that curious. [Snipped from this post.]

Kevin Edgecomb has replied to Jim “with attitude,” and attempts a kind of reductio ad absurdum argument. I think that Jim is correct to say that the claim of the line—”Israel is laid waste; his seed is no more”—must be taken seriously. However, I also think that Kevin is correct to say that taking this line seriously inherently means taking the genre of royal boasts seriously, and that interpreters are right (a possibility Jim allows) to see the claim of Israel’s “extermination” as propagandistic exaggeration.

The Merneptah stele itself provides a useful analogy: “Ashkelon is carried off.” Clearly this is hyperbolic or, better, metonymic language. The city of Ashkelon was not literally carried off by Merneptah’s soldiers (I am having visions of camels pulling flatbed “wide load” trailers with halves of double-wides on them), for Tiglath-Pileser III was certainly able to find it without much difficulty over four centuries later. Merneptah’s propagandist clearly means to say that plunder and/or captives were taken from Ashkelon—perhaps in significant numbers—but not that the city itself was relocated. Something similar is likely happening with the other boasts, including the boast of Yenoam’s extermination and the bereavement (not extermination) of Israel. Even if we insist that Merneptah’s claim must be taken with utmost literalness, Merneptah claims to have exterminated Israel’s “seed,” not Israel itself, just as it claims to have “widowed,” not annihilated, Hurru. Even if Merneptah wiped out an entire generation of “Israelites”—which hardly seems likely—the possibiity of rebuilding the population remains, for only its “seed,” not the entire group, is said to be “no more.”

Yet I don’t think it’s at all required to read Merneptah’s claim with that degree of literalism, and indeed the genre speaks against such. Baruch Halpern is helpful here. In his book David’s Secret Demons—with which I have some serious quibbles—Halpern proffers what he calls the “Tiglath-Pileser principle.” I don’t have the time or inclination to repeat all the basis for Halpern’s argument here; see David’s Secret Demons, pp. 124-132, for the complete treatment. In sum, based on an examination of selected inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser I, Halpern concludes, “it is the nature of the genre [of royal victory boasts] that the author distinguishes the various treatments he metes out in the detailed accounts of his campaigns, but blurs the distinctions in the summary accounts.” Halpern shows that a small victory over an enemy or rival can be transformed in summary statements into a grand, sweeping defeat that is belied by the actual details. “In Assyrian royal inscriptions, then, the torching of a grain field is the conquest of a whole territory beyond it. A looting raid becomes a claim of perpetual sovereignty. But this does not mean that campaigns can be confected. The technique is that of putting extreme spin on real events.” Halpern therefore proposes the following heuristic for reading such inscriptions:

The question is, what is the minimum the king might have done to lay claim to the achievements he publishes? Looting a town? He shoplifted a toothbrush from the local drug store. Ravaging the countryside? Perhaps he trampled crops near a farmstead. Receiving submission from distant kings in lands one hasn’t invaded? A delegation arrived to inaugurate diplomatic relations. Each small mark of prestige becomes the evidence for a grand triumph.

Not long ago, a candidate for the American presidency claimed to have “invented the Internet.” He didn’t, but he had promoted it a little. The point is, such figures cannot make claims without any basis in fact, risible assertions, lest they invite mockery, as that inventor of the Internet did. But it is always a temptation to paint one’s achievements in the best of all possible lights. To correct for this tendency, one has merely to imagine what insignificant action would produce the claim that “I conquered Egypt” (a raid on a border station in the Sinai). The same political hermeneutic applies reasonably well today.

Halperns’ “Tiglath-Pileser principle” seems to me a good guide to reading the Merneptah stele. What is the minimum that Merneptah would have to do to claim that “Israel is laid waste; his seed is no more”? Some sort of victory over a youthful militia band, perhaps. Maybe even several victories over Israelites young and old. But if Halpern’s principle can be applied as well to Egyptian royal inscriptions as to Assyrian ones, then to insist on inferring from the Merneptah stele that Merneptah’s army really did exterminate Merneptah’s Israel is going much too far not only for the precise wording of the line but also, more importantly, for the genre of the piece. Thus I think that Jim is incorrect to conclude:

It shows, first, that some group called by an Egyptian “Israel” existed and had been defeated (if not wiped out). … It shows, second, that whoever this Israel was, it was conquered and at least soundly stomped if not exterminated by the Egyptians.

Read with appropriate attention to the genre of royal victory inscriptions, I don’t believe the Merneptah stele does what Jim opines in this quotation.

It seems likely to me that if we did not have a biblical historiographical tradition of which to be skeptical, no one would doubt that there was an organic continuity between Merneptah’s people of Israel and Shalmaneser III’s kingdom of Israel. If so, and if all of the above analysis is sound, what do we learn about Iron I Israel from the Merneptah stele? Not much. In the absence of all other evidence, the Merneptah stele would lead us to think that a people group known to the Egyptians as “Israel” lived somewhere in late 13th-century Syria-Palestine, perhaps as far southwest as the coastal plain, perhaps as far northeast as the sea of Galilee and its environs. We would also think that Merneptah engaged at least some subset of this group in battle around 1210 BCE or shortly thereafter and inflicted at least a minor defeat on that group. That’s as far as we can take the Merneptah stele itself. But again, since ninth-century Assyrian inscriptions refer to an Israel in roughly the same place 400 years later, I think it would be reasonable to conclude, on the basis of inscriptions alone, that Merneptah’s people of Israel organized into a nation-state sometime between the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 9th centuries BCE.

Finally, I wish to reply to an aside that Jim tosses in:

And, by the way, as a quick aside, does the Biblical account of the conquest and settlement record any Egyptian victories in Canaan during that period? Memory may have failed me but I can’t think of any.

Despite the rhetorical flourish, Jim knows full well that there is nothing about Merneptah in the biblical books of Joshua or Judges. If the authors of those books knew any traditions about a skirmish between Israelites and Egyptians in the relevant time frame, they didn’t incorporate such traditions into their books. But I am not sure what Jim thinks the impact of this observation is. The biblical writers also did not mention the battle of Qarqar, as far as I can tell, even though the Kurkh Monolith places Ahab there. Everybody, even the most ardent maximalist, agrees that the biblical narratives, even if they contain historically reliable material, are highly selective in their reporting.

Hooray! I passed!

Duane over at Abnormal Interests (who is turning out to be a trenchant critic—in all the best senses of those words—of my posts on creationism and ID) posted this, so I thought I’d give it a go …

You Passed 8th Grade Science

Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct!

I managed 8/8, but I was very uncertain about the ch… wait, if I go any farther, I’ll tip you off to the test questions.

Accordance software for Macintosh

Despite the announcement of Macintosh Bible software from Logos, Accordance remains the superior choice for the Macintosh. Joe Weaks explains why.

Another ID stir in Kansas

Inside Higher Ed has a story today about a Kansas professor who has gotten into hot water for his intemperate comments about intelligent design. Read the whole story, but the gist of it is that Paul Mirecki, chair of the Religious Studies department at the University of Kansas, scheduled himself to teach a new course entitled “Intelligent Design, Creationism and Other Religious Mythologies.” (They must be really well off at UK KU if professors can teach “vanity” courses instead of servicing the general education and major requirements, but that’s another story.) Mirecki, however, posted an inflammatory e-mail to a closed listserv run by the Society of Open-Minded Atheists and Agnostics, and it leaked. Here’s an excerpt from the IHE article:

So when newspapers published e-mail comments by the professor who created the new course in which he mocked intelligence design, legislators and other supporters of intelligent design interrupted their Thanksgiving vacations to demand that the university do something — and many said that the course should be called off. A spokeswoman for the university said Sunday that the chancellor of the university would review the plans for the course, in light of the e-mail comments of the professor, Paul Mirecki, who is the chair of religious studies at Kansas.

In the e-mail message to a listserv, Mirecki said of intelligent design: “The fundies want it all taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big fat face by teaching it as a religious studies class under the category ‘mythology.’” Mirecki said he was “doing my part” to upset “the religious right” and signed his posting “Evil Dr. P.”

Higgaion readers know full well that I’m no fan of intelligent design or creationism, but Mirecki’s motives and comments seem to me way out of bounds for an academic proposing a course. By expressing his motive for teaching the course not as a search for truth or at least for a more adequate understanding, but rather as a surgical strike against “the religious right,” Mirecki has become (by his own words) a living caricature: the atheistic religious studies professor out to destroy students’ faith. It bothers me as a professor that Mirecki’s stated agenda for his course is anti-religious, and it bothers me as a believer because I have deep religious reasons for rejecting creationism and ID.

C.S. Lewis’s stepson and the new Narnia movie

Sci-Fi Wire has a nice, brief article today about Douglas Gresham’s involvement with the storyline of Disney’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Gresham is, of course, Lewis’s stepson; according to the article, he is credited as a co-producer on the film and worked with director Andrew Adamson to keep the movie true to C.S. Lewis’s vision.

The National Review‘s John J. Miller on Narnia

I just ran across this delightful article on Narnia—focusing on the Lewis novels, not the upcoming Disney movie—and wanted to share it with all other Narnia fans out there. Read and enjoy.

Another blog for the roll

I’ve just learned from Dr. Claude Mariottini, professor of Old Testament at Northern Baptist Seminary, that he maintains an eponymous blog in which he deals with topics of interest to me as a biblical scholar. I believe that Claude (pardon the familiarity, but blogdom is a first-name place) was sitting near me at the SBL biblioblogging session. Claude’s blog appears to have been created in August 2005, but I did not know of its existence until Claude e-mailed a notice to me and, I presume, others in the blogosphere. Judging by a quick read over some recent posts, Claude, it’s likely that I’m going to be disagreeing with you on a number of points related to historical reconstruction and exegetical practice and results, but I’ve nevertheless added your blog to my list of regularly read blogs.

The Jewish Exponent on the Tel Zayit abecedary: “Leaping logic, Batman!”

Jim West draws our attention to a recent article in The Jewish Exponent on the Tel Zayit abecedary. The article provides two wonderful photographs: one of Tappy with the stone, which will show you the size of the artifact, and one of the archaeological square in which the stone was found. However, the content of the article needs a closer look and a bit of counterbalancing.

Reporting on the Tel Zayit session Sunday night at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting, JE reporter Brian Schwartzman writes:

Hundreds packed into the room, standing against the walls and sitting in the aisles, not so much to learn about the history of writing but to ascertain what the discovery might mean in terms of that age-old conundrum: How historically accurate are the events depicted in the Bible?

I sure hope not too many of those hundreds of people hope to learn about the historical accuracy of the Bible from the Tel Zayit abecedary, for the Tel Zayit abecedary does not bear on the question of the historicity of any specific biblical narrative or the biblical narratives generally. This is a point that has to be hammered home again and again until it sticks: the Tel Zayit abecedary does not bear on the question of the historicity of any specific biblical narrative or the biblical narratives generally. It is a significant find for the history of writing and literacy in the southern Levant—it might be a paleographer’s dream come true—but the Tel Zayit abecedary does not bear on the question of the historicity of any specific biblical narrative or the biblical narratives generally.

Schwartzman’s article continues:

Tappy was hesitant to offer any broad conclusions, instead providing the technical details of how the inscription was discovered and analyzed. But in an interview following the presentation, he hinted at where he hopes the find will lead.

“I believe we will come to the conclusion that this does belong to an emerging kingdom,” said Tappy, referring to the United Kingdom of Israel, which the books of Samuel and Kings describe as being ruled by the great kings David and Solomon.

Tappy’s predication may be right—”we” (that is, Tappy and company) may come to the conclusion that the Tel Zayit abecedary belongs to an emerging kingdom—but there is nothing about the abecedary itself that would suggest this conclusion. To infer an emerging kingdom from the abecedary would be a thoroughgoing non sequitur. There’s nothing about this abecedary or abecedaries in general that suggest a kingdom. Now it may be that other material from Tel Zayit would somehow imply its incorporation into a kingdom in the same time period from which the abecedary stems, in which case the abecedary would belong to a kingdom, but the abecedary itself has no connection to a kingdom. I can imagine that someone might put forward a chain of reasoning like the following: the abecedary was written by a scribe, and scribes have to be trained, and scribes are trained in scribal schools, and scribal schools must have sponsorship, and that sponsorship must come from an authority instutition, and 10th-century Zeitah was too small to sponsor a scribal school by itself, so the sponsorship must have come from an authority institution higher than the level of the village, and that must therefore imply some sort of confederation of settlements with a centralized authority, which looks something like a kingdom. But that is a long chain of inferences, and each link in the chain needs to be substantiated.

In the JE interview, Tappy seems to give in to overstatement and wishful thinking.

Not only does the abecedary suggest that a literate society occupied 10th-century BCE Israel, he said, but it offers hope that full written accounts of the period are still out there, yet to be unearthed.

One abecedary does not a literate society make. Moreover, I think it is important to interrogate the connection between scribal activity and literacy. If an abecedary is indeed evidence of a scribal school, that implies that literacy is a professional skill in that society, which would generally be a sign of low or limited literacy, not high literacy, in that society. We shouldn’t be expecting to find any copies of The Libnah Daily Reporter in the tel. It also seems that one of the big effects of the abecedary has been to get people’s hopes up: “What else might be out there?” It’s a big leap from one abecedary to “full written accounts of the period,” though such accounts are desiderata for everyone interested in the history of the ancient Levant.

Schwartzman goes on to briefly caricature “minimalism” and to discuss the modern-day political ramifications of attempts to reconstruct the history of Israel. See the article itself for those aspects of the report. Jim West focuses on that part of the article. I have to quibble with Jim on a couple of points, though. First, Jim quotes the following from Schwartzman:

The idea that a unified, sophisticated political state existed in ancient Israel so far back in antiquity has come under attack by scholars in recent years, particularly those representing a minority faction of biblical historians. They hold to a view of minimalism, meaning that the text is comprised of little more than myth, and is virtually no use to those trying to understand the reality of the period.

For many evangelical Christians, the minimalist view flies in the face of the belief that everything contained in the Bible is 100 percent true. For Jews, however, minimalism presents clear political and theological challenges, according to scholars, who point out that the long history of the Jewish people in ancient Israel serves as a primary underpinnings of modern Zionism and the state of Israel.

Gratz College president Jonathan Rosenbaum, an expert in the Bible and the ancient Near East, said findings like the discovery at Tel Zayit, or another inscription discovered several years ago at the Tel Dan site near Lebanon referring to the “House of David,” reinforce the view that the Bible is a valuable historical tool and chronicle of the Jewish experience in the land of Israel.

“The biblical text is based on historical knowledge,” said Rosenbaum. “The book of Kings gives its sources, and cites its footnotes.”

Then Jim writes:

That is, of course, pure, unmitigated rubbish. But, as we all know, it’s rubbish that sells. And if you can beat a straw man while pretending that he really threatens, then you win twice the prize. The biblical text is no more based on historical knowledge than a math text is based on Chaucer. And that some are trying to stretch the artifact to some sort of strange “proof” of the biblical chronology, well, it simply defies reason.

Jim, I need to press on you this point: what is “this” in your first line? What is unmitigated rubbish? The idea that some scholars believe that the biblical text holds little or nothing of value for reconstructing the history of the 10th-century Shephelah isn’t rubbish; in fact, I believe that is your understanding of the case! The idea that many evangelical Christians think the Bible is 100% historically accurate isn’t rubbish; it’s a simple statement of statistical fact (many evangelicals do think so). The idea that a certain understanding of ancient Israelite history underpins modern Zionism isn’t rubbish; again, that’s a simple description of one aspect of Zionism.

I suppose that Jim’s “rubbish” is found in Rosenbaum’s comments. The abecedary certainly doesn’t “reinforce the view that the Bible is a valuable historical tool and chronicle of the Jewish experience in the land of Israel.” Or maybe Jim is referring to Rosenbaum’s comment about the book of Kings citing sources and using footnotes. That, indeed, is a vast overstatement, but I wouldn’t call it “unmitigated rubbish.” The book of Kings does contain embedded references to annalistic sources. We don’t have those annals, and can’t check the “footnotes.” As far as we know for sure, the annals never existed, though this seems to me prima facie unlikely given the annalistic procivities of the larger Mesopotamian kingdoms and the probable desire of the kings of ninth- through sixth-century Israel and Judah to be seen as “real” kings ruling over “real” kingdoms—”Real kings keep annals” (I am spinning this off of Bill Schniedewind’s How the Bible Became a Book, though I don’t find everything in that volume convincing at present). But the references are there, and saying that they’re there is not “unmitigated rubbish.” I hasten to add that Rosenbaum’s implication (per Schwartzman’s report) that these references reinforce the historical value of Kings is a leap that involves affirming all of the following claims, any one of which is open to question and needs to be substantiated: (1) the annals referred to in Kings really existed, (2) those annals still existed at the time Kings was written, (3) the material in those annals was historically accurate, and (4) the author(s) of Kings faithfully reproduced in Kings what (t)he(y) found in those annals. Note, please, that even if all of these claims could be substantiated, it would still be necessary to carefully delineate which material in Kings came from the annals and which did not, and that any confidence in historicity gained from reasoning like the foregoing would apply only to the material drawn from the annalistic sources; that confidence should not be transferred “by association” to material drawn from other sources.

That being said, Jim, I have to demur from your statement that “The biblical text is no more based on historical knowledge than a math text is based on Chaucer.” That seems to me both an “apples and oranges” comparison and an inaccurate statement. A text like 2 Kings 18-20 relies, at a minimum, on some kernel of historical memory of King Hezekiah and an Assyrian siege of Jerusalem, just as does the text on the Sennacherib Prism. The book of Kings at least has the appearance of presenting stories from an Israelite past, whereas a math textbook has no appearance of relation to Middle English literature. Overstated rhetoric doesn’t help the cause of caution any more than it helps the maximalist case, in my judgment.

Marc Zvi Brettler isn’t a creationist either

And here are some of the reasons why. Props to Tyler Williams for the reference.

My attempt at the Tel Zayit alphabet

Along with Jim and Karyn, I also tried to copy down the Tel Zayit alphabet as traced by Kyle McCarter. I offer it, and some comments, here with the important caveats that (1) this is a digital photograph of my attempt to reproduce what I was seeing on a screen at the front of the room, and I was sitting at the back, and (2) I am no epigrapher nor much of an artist, so take this lightly, and wait for McCarter’s tracings to appear in publication. Also, I copied down the letter forms on the back of my SBL convention badge, so I only tried to reproduce the letter forms, not the line of the inscription or the line break.

That being said, let me show you my sketch (click on it for a larger version):

A few items of note:

  1. You already know about the letter reversals (if you don’t, read this).
  2. I might have copied things down wrong, but it sure looked to me like the Tel Zayit ḥeth is a mirror-image of the Gezer ḥeth, based on my sketches. However, when I look at the actual inscriptions, I think the vertical strokes on my sketch are seriously exaggerated and there may not be that rotation/flip in reality.
  3. McCarter characterized the Tel Zayit mem as a later form than the Gezer mem, but all the other letters look earlier. My drawing of the Gezer mem looks too curvy, not angular enough. The horizontal lines on the Tel Zayit samek look like they’re farther apart than the lines on the Gezer samek.
  4. The leftmost vertical line on the Tel Zayit tsade seems sharply angled, rather than the more vertical Gezer stroke. My sketch of the rightmost horizontal stroke on the Gezer tsade seems too curved, and should be flatter.
  5. The upper loop on the Tel Zayit qoph is more onion-shaped, while the same shape on the Gezer qoph seems more heart-shaped in my sketch, but looking at photos of the Gezer calendar I think my sketch exaggerates the difference.
  6. The middle strokes on the Tel Zayit sin cross, while on the Gezer sin they meet.

I’ve also tried to trace the visible letters on the AP image of Kyle McCarter lecturing about the abecedary.

The image is not really suitable for tracing—and remember, I’m an exegete, not an epigrapher—so don’t hang anything heavy on my tracing. I had a really hard time seeing the ḥeth. I also can’t really see the curving border around the teth (there’s no teth on the Gezer Calendar for comparison), and there are a number of lines that seem to be either intentional or accidental scratches (and not necessarily made by whoever wrote the alphabet).

Next »