A Very Brief History of Old Hebrew Script
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Footnotes
1. The authenticity of the recently published “Jerusalem Papyrus” is, in my view, doubtful. For more, see Christopher Rollston, “The King of Judah, Jars of Wine, and the City of Jerusalem,” Bible History Daily (blog), published October 25, 2017.
2. Strata: “Royal Seal of King Hezekiah Comes to Light in Jerusalem Excavation,” BAR, March/April 2016.
3. Orly Goldwasser, “How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs,” BAR, March/April 2010.
Endnotes
1.
Translations are taken from Shmuel Aḥituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008). The orthography of personal names has been simplified. For a beautiful introduction to Old Hebrew inscriptions, see the last book by the late, renowned paleographer Ada Yardeni, The National Hebrew Script: Up to the Babylonian Exile (Jerusalem: Carta, 2018).
2. See Grace J. Park, “Polar אמ in Oaths and the Question of Literacy in Lachish 3,” ZAW 125 (2013), pp. 463–478.
3. Christopher A. Rollston, “Scribal Education in Ancient Israel: The Old Hebrew Epigraphic Evidence,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 344 (2006), pp. 47–74.
4.
See William M. Schniedewind, The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2019).
5. See Antony Perrot and Matthieu Richelle, “The Dead Sea Scrolls Paleo-Hebrew Script: Its Roots in Hebrew Scribal Tradition,” in Élodie Attia and Antony Perrot, eds., The Hebrew Bible: A Millennium (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). See detailed charts at www.paleohebrewdss.com.
6. André Lemaire, Levantine Epigraphy and History in the Achaemenid Period (539–332 BCE) (Oxford: The British Academy/Oxford Univ. Press, 2015), pp. 43–45.
7.
The most optimistic estimations situate the earliest Old Hebrew Dead Sea scrolls in the fifth or fourth century B.C.E. See Salomo A. Birnbaum, The Hebrew Scripts (Leiden: Brill, 1971), col. 64–70; Michael Langlois, “Dead Sea Scrolls Paleography and the Samaritan Pentateuch,” in Michael Langlois, ed., The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Peeters: Leuven, 2019), pp. 255–285. The generally accepted earliest date is the third century B.C.E.