Hebrew First Temple Period Inscriptions

לעמוד הרכישה של הספר באתר תבונות: http://herzogpress.herzog.ac.il/book_page.asp?id=257

בעומדו על מכונו, תפס המקדש מקום משמעותי בקשר שבין עם ישראל לבין אלוהיו. עם החורבן, סבר העם שהוא נידון להיות מרוחק ומסולק מעם ה', וכי ניתק קשר הברית בינו לבין אלוהים. עניין זה מתבטא גם במגילת איכה שלאורך הדורות קראו אותה רבים בעיקר כדי לקונן על החורבן של המקדש הראשון, וברבות הדורות גם על חורבנו של הבית השני, ועל הגלות הארוכה הקשה שבאה בעקבותיו.
בספר איכה: מייאוש לתפילה טוען חוקר המקרא פרופ' אלי עסיס שמגילת איכה אינה רק קינה ונֶהִי על החורבן אלא היא נועדה גם ובעיקר לתת תקווה לעם בחשכת הגלות, ולהעביר את המקונן מייאוש לתפילה, ולאימוץ התפיסה שמצב החורבן הוא זמני משום שה' לא ניתק את קשר הברית עִם עמו. המגילה מבטאת את הרעיון שגם אם בניית המקדש נדחתה בינתיים, רצונו של העם להרגיש רצוי על ידי ה' אפשרי, וכי הברית עִימו לעולם קיימת. "הֲשִׁיבֵנוּ ה' אֵלֶיךָ וְנָשׁוּבָה, חַדֵּשׁ יָמֵינוּ כְּקֶדֶם".
העם המקונן את המגילה אמנם מבטא בכך את כאבו ואת צערו, אבל תוך כדי קריאת המגילה הוא מפנים את התפיסה שה' לא זנח את עמו, ובאמצעות קריאתהּ הוא מקווה לחידוש הקשר בינו לבין אלוהיו. הדרך המתוחכמת שבה עובר הקורא מייאוש לתקווה מודגמת בניתוח של מגילת איכה שלפניכם.

פרופ' אלי עסיס חיבר ספרים על יהושע, שופטים, שיר השירים ויואל, ובהוצאה זו פרסם את הספר מאבק על זהות. הוא גם פרסם מאמרים רבים בתחום הסיפורת המקראית, השירה והנבואה. פרופ' עסיס שימש כראש המחלקה לתנ"ך, וכדיקן הפקולטה למדעי היהדות באוניברסיטת בר אילן.

Email for full.  Ancient scribes writing Biblical Hebrew could mark a Goal argument (the place to which one is moving) with the directive he suffix, with a directional preposition, or as an accusative of destination.  Previous studies have explained this alternation in terms of a few historical or linguistic variables at a time.  In this study, I use a comprehensive dataset (all factive Goals from prose Biblical Hebrew texts), a broad set of potential explanatory variables coded for each Goal and the clause in which it appears (including more than thirty diachronic, social, and linguistic variables, with a particular focus on previously-understudied syntactic-semantic variables), various statistical tools (especially multinomial logistical regression), and comparative data (from Epigraphic Hebrew, Biblical Aramaic, Ugaritic, and Akkadian) to explore the influences on and choices of the ancient scribes.  Important findings of this study include indications that 1) scribes of the Late Biblical Hebrew corpus consciously promoted the use of directive he despite the convergence of the Late Biblical Hebrew goal-marking system with that of Aramaic, as evidenced in the behavior of the goal-marking prepositions across time (a conclusion not consistent with purely stylistic explanations of the linguistic differences between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew); 2) due to educational and social disruptions during the exile, the scribes originating texts described as Transitional Biblical Hebrew mobilized fewer prestigious linguistic features than scribes of the Classical and Late corpora, as evidenced by limitations in their goal-marking repertoires and paralleled by data from other Semitic corpora; 3) the scribes’ choices between goal-marking strategies are largely driven by sensitivity to a Prototypical Intransitive Motion Construction (in which a salient Affected Agent moves successfully and completely to an inanimate single-point Goal that contains inherent, specific geographic information) and other Motion Construction prototypes (Caused-Motion, Pursuit, etc.), with the directive he and the accusative of direction being strongly correlated with more-prototypical environments; and 4) individual prepositions may encode the type of Goal location (single-point or divisible), the place of the Goal in the information structure of the text, the mover’s configuration with respect to the Goal, or Goal animacy.

The thesis concentrates on computational methods pertaining to ancient ostraca - ink on clay inscriptions, written in Hebrew. These texts originate from the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and dated to the late First Temple period (8th – early 6th centuries BCE). The ostraca are almost the sole remaining epigraphic evidence from the First Temple period and are therefore important for archaeological, historical, linguistic, and religious studies of this era. This “noisy” material offers a fertile ground for the development of various “robust” image analysis, image processing, computer vision and machine learning methods, dealing with the challenging domain of ancient documents’ analysis. The common procedures of modern epigraphers involve manual and labor-intensive steps, facing the risk of unintentionally mixing documentation with interpretation. Therefore, the main goal of this study is establishing a computerized paleographic framework for handling First Temple period epigraphic material. The major research questions, addressed in this thesis are: quality evaluation of manual facsimiles; quality evaluation of ostraca images; automatic binarization of the documents and its subsequent refinement; quality evaluation of binarizations on global and local levels; identification of different writers between inscriptions (two distinct methods are proposed); image segmentation (with improvements over the classical Chan-Vese algorithm); and letters’ shape prior estimation. The developed methods were tested on real-world archaeological and modern data and their results are found to be favorable.

In the course of sifting earth removed from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, dozens of clay sealings from the First Temple period were recovered. Among them was a sealing bearing the name of the priestly family of Immer. In-depth study of the writing on the sealing, as well as the fabric imprint on its reverse, indicated with a high probability that this sealing was used in the Temple treasury. The article reviews the function and use of sealings in the administration of ancient Near Eastern treasuries and the significance of sealings with a textile imprint on their reverse. The study revealed similar patterns in the finds near the "Royal Building" exposed in the Ophel excavations, and we therefore suggest identifying it with Judah's royal treasury.

This doctoral thesis aims to present what came to be built through the Solomon s First Temple Imaginary, which many people still believe in the nowadays that it is factual. However, the Temple as presented in the Hebrew Bible never existed, because no more than an annex king s palace; it s also not factual the myths circulating the kings David and Solomon, which were not as grand as the Hebrew Bible points. Nevertheless, on two occasions in the history of Judah, the Deuteronomist Revolution and the Return of the Captivity, the Temple had a centralizating function and required many founding myths to legitimize it. With such myths, the people who were near the Temple felt more part of the House of Yahweh for believing participate of a plan established by the Creator of the Universe and all the stories invented and developed by the Deuteronomist and the Priestly gave them greatest joy and hope. What happened in fact was the king s power legitimacy in the context of Deuteronomist Reform and the priest s power in the return of the Captivity in the early Persian period. As for the post-exile, for being a more recent period, is greater amount of elements that characterize the stimulation of popular imaginary regarding the First Temple than in the period of the Deuteronomist Reform, despite the latter being period of prosperity for the Kingdom of Judah.

Această lucrare se axează pe descoperirile arheologice din Ierusalim, începând cu perioada Pre-Davidică şi până la Căderea Primului Templu. De altfel, se ocupă cu prezentarea straturilor arheologice existente din perioada indicată şi consultă izvoarele istorice ale vremii.

This article first discusses the argument that since Standard Biblical Hebrew (SBH) is identical with the language of the Hebrew inscriptions of the monarchic period, it cannot be dated to the Persian or later periods. In response it is argued that even if SBH is identical to inscriptional Hebrew this does not prove that SBH was not also used, say, in the Persian period. Then it investigates the inscriptions and concludes that in fact they represent an independent linguistic corpus (or more than one) rather than being identical to SBH.
Updated with better copy January 2018.

In this study, I investigate the relationship between archaeology and the Bible through Israelite and Judean theophoric personal names from the Iron Age II period (c. tenth century BCE until the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE). I collect the names from the Hebrew Bible and analyse them according to their theophoric content, chronology, and political affiliation. Then, I compare the political and chronological distributions of the different theophoric elements in these names with those of archaeological names collected and analysed in a previous study. The comparisons reveal that the distribution of the theophoric elements in Judean names in the Bible is similar to that in archaeology. In Israelite names, however, the distribution of theophoric elements in the Bible is completely different from that in archaeology. The distribution of theophoric elements of Israelite names in the Bible is similar to that of Judean names. These results may be interpreted to indicate that the Bible reflects Judean and not Israelite onomastic traditions.

The meaning of asherah in the inscriptions from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom has been a focus of persistent discussion and debate, and still today the divergence in scholarly views is wide-ranging. The present paper aims to critically assess previous scholarship by examining each of the major proposals that have been made for elucidating the term and in the process advance an interpretation that is methodologically defensible and historically more plausible given our present knowledge of the cultural context of ancient Israel-Judah. Because asherah likely refers to a female deity and yet the designation is declined with a pronominal suffix, I propose that the term is a hitherto unattested common noun denoting YHWH’s female partner and that the goddess is to be distinguished from the goddess Asherah.

The growing number of Hebrew personal names from Iron Age II archaeological excavations, especially of Judaean sites, enables us to
analyse these names as a separate group and achieve statistically meaningful results. 625 names from 40 sites in Judah were collected (Appendix A). The names were studied according to different attributes, such as the distribution of theophoric and non-theophoric names, theophoric elements in names, prefixed and suffixed theophoric elements, and popular names. This study contributes to our understanding of Judah as a distinct group. An almost complete absence of names in Judah during the tenth and ninth centuries may eflect limited literacy and/or administration. Names appear in significant numbers from the mid-eighth century on, indicating Judah was clearly a state by that time. The extremely limited use of divine names other than YHWH or El (1%), the absence of בעל , the remarkably high use of 74% ) יהו ), the large increase of יהו names from the eighth to seventh century, and the dominance of popular names with יהו in the seventh century, may indicate the spread of Yahwism, specially during the seventh century. Names with the element שלם are also popular in Judah in the seventh century.

The ancient territory of Idumea has produced a wealth of ostraca. To date, there are about 1200 pieces of inscribed potsherds that have been published while more publications of these inscribed ostraca await. Once all of them are published, the total amount will approach about 2000 inscribed sherds. The bulk of the Idumean ostraca written in Aramaic date from the 4 th century BCE, the range of the dated inscriptions being from 361 to 311 BCE. It appears that the great majority of the ostraca come from the site referred to in Arabic as: Khirbet el-Qôm, corresponding to ancient Makkedah as indicated on a number of ostraca themselves coming from that site (mqdh). Since the ostraca appeared for sale on the antiquity market and are now dispersed in several private and public collections, one major problem is to determine the exact provenance of each piece. This paper analyses an ostracon from Khirbet el-Qôm, from the private collection of Shlomo Moussaieff, written in Hebrew and presumably dated from the 6 th century BCE. The food list on this ostracon seems to constitute a kind of menu for a group of people listing items

A review of how the discovery of new evidence for ancient Hebrew, from pre-exilic inscriptions and the Dead Sea Scrolls, has led to different perspectives on the history of Hebrew, and the nature of our sources for it, particularly the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible.

The linguistic peculiarities of the Gezer Calendar inscription are investigated and a case is made that the Calendar is Hebrew based on a comparison with the style of Archaic Biblical Hebrew poetry. Archaic Biblical Hebrew is, further, defined as primarily a style, rather than a chronological phase.

The hypothesis that scribes, priests and the upper class formed the literate segment of ancient Israelite society seems to be the best reading of the evidence. Israel was therefore a literate society in that the use of writing was widespread, and was for many a day-to-day part of life. Nevertheless, the majority of the population had access to the literate world only through intermediaries.

The late seventh century BCE judicial plea ostracon from Mesad Hashavyahu is argued to be written in a low quality type of literary Hebrew by a scribe who wrote neatly, but was not skilled in literary composition. It is not evidence of the spoken Hebrew of the peasant whose plea it is.

An article by Richard Hess is framed as if it is a response to my earlier article on Israelite literacy. Hess argues that epigraphic evidence must be given first place when discussing Israelite literacy. However, this evidence on its own is unable to tell us anything about the extent of literacy. Instead, a clear picture emerges from biblical and non-biblical evidence that ancient Israelite literacy was generally confined to priests, scribes and government officials.

The hypothesis that scribes, priests and the upper class formed the literate segment of ancient Israelite society seems to be the best reading of the evidence. Israel was therefore a literate society in that the use of writing was widespread, and was for many a day-to-day part of life. Nevertheless, the majority of the population had access to the literate world only through intermediaries.

(Original Title: Quest to pinpoint when Bible was written misses the point). This article responds to a report in the New York Times and elsewhere, that research on short documents from the military base at Arad reveals that there were many more people who could read and write around 600 B.C. in the kingdom of Judah, and that that means the Bible was written earlier than scholars had previously thought. It points out that literacy was still limited at this time, and that asking when the Bible was written is the wrong question.