Text Treasures: Gezer Calendar

TODD BOLEN / BIBLEPLACES.COM

The so-called Gezer Calendar is a small limestone slab inscribed with a list of agricultural activities covering one full year. Thought to date from the tenth century BCE, it is one of the earliest known Canaanite inscriptions from Judah. Some would claim it is the earliest known inscription in Old Hebrew. The text reads:

His two months (are olive) harvest, his two months (are)
grain planting; his two months (are) late planting;
his month (is) hoeing up of flax;
his month (is) barley harvest;
his month (is) harvest and festivity;
his two months (are) vine-tending;
his month (is) summer fruit.
Abiyah

The Irish archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister found the calendar in 1908, just before he left the field of biblical archaeology to devote the rest of his life to Celtic archaeology. His excavations at Tel Gezer, on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund, were some of the earliest large-scale excavations in the region, and his brutish approach did not allow for careful documentation of stratigraphy. As a result, the Gezer Calendar does not come from a secure archaeological context. The archaeological strata generally date to the early monarchic period (tenth–ninth centuries BCE). The artifact’s script and language support this dating, placing it in a period when Gezer transitioned from being a Canaanite city-state to a key administrative center of the emerging Israelite kingdom.

This small tablet, currently in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, is about 4.25 inches tall, 3.5 inches wide, and half-an-inch thick. Broken off at the bottom, it was originally almost 6 inches tall. It is made of soft limestone, which made it convenient for writing. The front side bears seven lines of text and a single word (presumably a name) in the lower left margin, while the back side shows only uncertain traces of writing.

Among the most heavily debated aspects of the calendar are its script and language. The early alphabetic script is mostly identified as either Phoenician or its later regional derivation, Old Hebrew. Similarly, although some categorize the language as Hebrew (likely a northern dialect), others interpret it as either Canaanite or Phoenician.^a The personal name preserved incompletely on the tablet’s lower left corner likely belongs to the author of the calendar. His reconstructed name, Abiyah, which occurs several times also in the Bible (including as a king of Judah, in 1 Kings 14:31), may be interpreted as Yahwistic (containing the element Yah and meaning “Yah[weh] is my father”), which would help identify the artifact as Israelite.

Despite its modern name, the Gezer Calendar is not a formal calendar with precise divisions of time, but it’s not a loose roster of agricultural activities either. Rather, it lists major agricultural activities according to seasons, which do not strictly conform to the 30-day month. It covers eight agricultural seasons (each identified in the text with the possessive pronoun “his” or “its”) spread most likely over 12 months, starting with the fall harvest (likely coinciding with the fall equinox or the Hebrew new year) and ending with the summer fruit harvest, in September. As for the inscription’s purpose, some scholars have considered it a farmers’ almanac, while others understand it as a writing or memory exercise. Alternatively, it could have served as a blessing tablet to be placed in a local temple as a constant reminder (before Yahweh or another god) to bless the crops in their seasons.

The seasonal cycle recorded in the Gezer Calendar seems to reflect the agricultural time-schedule of the Shephelah, the area of low foothills where Gezer is located. The slow and awkward scribal hand may indicate a scribal trainee or the emergence of scribal practices outside of the professional bureaucracy. In terms of ancient literacy, the Gezer Calendar—alongside the Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon, the abecedary from Tel Zayit, and the Izbet Sartah abecedary—suggests that writing was well established in tenth-century Judah. These four inscriptions contend for being the oldest one written in Hebrew language and/or script, although some scholars claim the earliest true Hebrew inscriptions came only after these.

The first scholarly publication of the Gezer Calendar appeared in 1909, in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement. A recent analysis was published in 1998.¹