Christopher Rollston recently published “The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon: Methodological Musings and Caveats” in Tel Aviv 38 (2011): 67–82. In this article, which I strongly recommend to anyone considering the implications of the Qeiyafa Ostracon for an archaeologically-informed take on Israelite and Judean history, Rollston concludes:
I would be happy to state that the Qeiyafa Ostracon was written in a particular language, if there were some diagnostic features in it that are most characteristic of a particular Iron Age Northwest Semitic language. The problem, however, is that there are not. For this reason, it is necessary to state that there is not sufficient evidence to make a determination. (p. 78)
Rollston also warns, with reference to attempts to use the several and significantly differing reconstructions of the Qeiyafa Ostracon’s content (or, in some cases, almost the Qeiyafa Ostracon’s mere existence) to draw conclusions about state formation and/or literacy somewhere in the vicinity of the turn of the first millennium BC:
[T]he field of scholarship must be very cautious about saddling this document with freight that it cannot readily carry.
Again, I strongly recommend the entire article for a no-nonsense assessment of whether or not the Qeiyafa Ostracon is written in Hebrew and what it can(not) tell us about early Israelite/Judean state formation. According to the publisher’s web site, Tel Aviv publishes open access papers; however, the online issues are served up by Ingenta, which has the articles from the June 2011 issue marked as subscriber-only rather than open access. I’ll use the closing words of Rollston’s article as the closing words of this post: when dealing with such sparse and inconclusive evidence, “[c]aution … should be the modus operandi.”