In our March/April 2006 issue, we published a picture of an inscribed pottery sherd found at Philistine Gath (Tell es-Safi) in an expedition led by Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University. According to Maeir this is the oldest Philistine inscription ever discovered—from the tenth–ninth century B.C.E. The inscription contains two names that, according to Maeir, may be linguistically related to Goliath, who hailed from Gath, according to the Bible. Although the names on the sherd do not refer to the Biblical Goliath, Maeir emphasizes, the inscription does show that the name was in circulation at the time. According to Maeir, the language of the inscription is Philistine, but the letters are Semitic, probably appropriated by the Philistines from the locals when the Philistines settled on what is now the southern Mediterranean coast of Israel.
In the current issue of the Israel Exploration Journal, Harvard’s Frank Cross (pictured) takes Maeir to task.1 Cross agrees with Maeir’s dating of the pottery sherd (tenth–ninth century B.C.E.) based on its archaeological context, but he says Maeir’s analysis of the script “violates method in paleographical typology and is linguistically cavalier.” To analyze the script, says Cross, “Maeir has cherry-picked archaic forms [of the letters] of various dates, and none with tenth–ninth-century forms … We know the tenth–ninth-century forms and stances [of letters] quite well in Phoenician, Hebrew and Moabite. The Tell es-Safi ostracon does not conform to the shapes and stances of the scripts of this period.”
Cross himself is unable to decipher the inscription or identify the language. It is neither Hebrew nor Phoenician. He says it is likely a Philistine experiment in transforming its syllabic script (probably still-undeciphered Cypro-Minoan from the Philistine homeland in the Aegean) into an alphabetic script.
As for Maeir’s attempt to relate the name on the ostracon to Goliath, Cross finds it “linguistically bizarre.”
Maeir told BAR he “absolutely disagrees” with Cross. He says he will reply in a “scholarly and collegial way” in a scientific publication. Maier added that it is unusual to be critical in this way before an inscription has been scientifically published in a scholarly journal.
In our March/April 2006 issue, we published a picture of an inscribed pottery sherd found at Philistine Gath (Tell es-Safi) in an expedition led by Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University. According to Maeir this is the oldest Philistine inscription ever discovered—from the tenth–ninth century B.C.E. The inscription contains two names that, according to Maeir, may be linguistically related to Goliath, who hailed from Gath, according to the Bible. Although the names on the sherd do not refer to the Biblical Goliath, Maeir emphasizes, the inscription does show that the name was in circulation at the time. According to Maeir, […]
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Frank Moore Cross and Lawrence E. Stager, “Cypro-Minoan Inscriptions Found in Ashkelon,” Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 56, No. 2 (2006; actually published: January 2007), pp. 129–159, esp. pp. 151–152.
