The New Jerusalem Inscription—So What?

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In 2012, while excavating at the southern wall of the Temple Mount, Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar discovered the oldest alphabetic inscription ever found in Jerusalem. It had been inscribed on a storage jar, but, alas, the jar had not fared well. Made of pottery, it had broken into pieces. Along with at least seven other broken jars, the pieces had somehow found another use. Masons at work on a new building used the pieces to level an uneven patch of ground. On two small pieces of one jar that fitted together were scratched letters of an early alphabet.

Although the letters are big (about an inch high), only five are complete. Traces of perhaps three additional letters are dimly visible. The beginning and end of the inscription are missing, and some letters are broken. The letters were inscribed just below the rim of the vessel before it was fired in the potter’s kiln.¹

Despite its brevity, the inscription can be dated paleographically—that is, by the shape and stance of the letters. It comes from a time even before the direction of the letters (rightward or leftward) had been settled. It comes from a time before the distinction between 050 Hebrew, Aramaic and Phoenician had developed. In short, the inscription can be dated to the 11th or 10th century B.C. Mazar provisionally dates the wall that the inscription helped support to the 10th century B.C. (the period of David and Solomon), so, if she is correct, the inscription cannot be later than this and could be somewhat earlier. But not much earlier because this type of jar continued to be used into the ninth century B.C.

At least seven different readings have been proposed by as many epigraphers (one a pair, making eight), including some of the world’s leading scholars in the field. (See sidebar.) Most read left to right; but at least one (Gershon Galil of the University of Haifa) reads right to left. One scholar claims it could be either. And of course different scholars, equally eminent, identify the same letters differently.

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Naturally we would be very interested in knowing with greater certainty (or even probably) what the inscription said. Shortly after it became known to scholars, Dr. Galil announced that the inscription might indicate that King Solomon had served cheap wine—perhaps to his less distinguished guests—so the press had a ball with the possibility. Some wag suggested the headline “King Solomon’s Two-Buck Chuck.”

The truth is that we are unlikely ever to know with any confidence what the inscription originally said. But the inscription is nevertheless important—and not just because it is the oldest alphabetic inscription ever found in Jerusalem.

In my judgment, the shape of the letters suit a date in the 11th century B.C. better than the 10th, but in either case the number of inscriptions from this period is quite small. Each example from this early period, when the national forms and shapes of the letter were just emerging, is precious. This is especially true of Jerusalem, where this is the first example to come to light.

We can say a lot about writing from this period with the aid of this inscription. For example, these letters were apparently scratched quite hastily; they are simply for information, not for display. For someone to inscribe a jar before it was baked, as in this case, indicates the presence in the potter’s workshop of someone able to write and someone able to read it at its destination. This was not done in the elevated study of the scribe who was making a record of the events of the king’s reign but in places where ordinary workmen made pots. Someone who could write might inscribe them, and then other workmen would unload them where someone else could read the label.

The rarity of inscriptions from this period is often the crux of the contention that hardly anyone at this time could read or write. Although the examples are few, they in fact counter this contention.^{a 2} That they have been found in different places and display varieties of writing and language suggests that there were several teachers rather than one scribal center.

The few surviving pieces from this early time were written for different reasons: to mark ownership (as evidenced by several potsherds and a gaming board), to teach or to practice writing (the Gezer Calendar, the Tel Zayit abecedary and perhaps the Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon) and for administrative purposes (our Jerusalem jar). (See sidebar.) Overall, they show there were writers at work across the southern part of the Land of Israel. Owners of pots scratched their names on them. One proudly marked his name on his stone gaming board at Beth Shemesh. Other inscriptions were apparently for teaching writing, like the list of a farmer’s duties on the “Gezer Calendar,” or practicing it, like the “abc” incised on a boulder built into a wall at Tel Zayit. The ostracon found at Khirbet Qeiyafa may be a student’s exercise, reproducing a list of names or perhaps a message. The Jerusalem jar found by Eilat Mazar seems to be a relic from some administrative activity. Overall, these are meager remnants from a long-established habit of writing.

The final question we may pose is: Why are there so few examples of these early inscriptions?

Most of the objects from an excavation come from the last decades of a phase of occupation.³ If a place is in use for several centuries, with the inhabitants building and rebuilding their houses, the final period will leave more for archaeologists to recover than the earlier periods, especially if the place was violently destroyed. Ancient people threw away what was unwanted and out-of-date.

That explains why there is much more pottery—and many more documents—from sites of the late eighth and seventh centuries in Judah, following the wholesale Assyrian and Babylonian attacks in the late eighth and early sixth centuries B.C., respectively. Because there was no comparable destruction in the tenth and ninth centuries B.C. in Israel and Judah, fewer finds of any sort come from those years.

Given these circumstances, we can justifiably assume that the surviving inscriptions from these early days—from the time of David and Solomon, if you will—represent only a minute proportion of the scribes who were writing in those days. Short of a startling find of leather scrolls from their reigns—like the Dead Sea Scrolls—we shall never see their work!

In 012, while excavating at the southern wall of the Temple Mount, Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar discovered the oldest alphabetic inscription ever found in Jerusalem. It had been inscribed on a storage jar, but, alas, the jar had not fared well. Made of pottery, it had broken into pieces. Along with at least seven other broken jars, the pieces had somehow found another use. Masons at work on a new building used the pieces to level an uneven patch of ground. On two small pieces of one jar that fitted together were scratched letters of an early alphabet. Although […]