The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon, the Gezer Calendar and the Earliest Hebrew Writing

The question of when Hebrew was first written down has no single answer, and the two objects most often cited in reply illustrate why. The first is a small limestone tablet found at Gezer in 1908, inscribed with a list of agricultural seasons and known since its first publication as the Gezer Calendar. For most of the twentieth century it was described as the oldest known Hebrew inscription.¹ The second is a broken potsherd inscribed in ink with five lines of text, found in 2008 at Khirbet Qeiyafa, a fortified site above the Valley of Elah in the Judaean Shephelah. Its excavators presented it as the earliest Hebrew inscription yet discovered, and it quickly became the focus of an energetic debate about the date of the site, the identity of its inhabitants, the language of the text and its relevance to the history of the early Israelite monarchy.² Neither object is a biblical text, and neither preserves any passage of Scripture. Both, however, stand near the beginning of the long history of alphabetic writing in the region in which the Hebrew Bible was later composed and transmitted, and the arguments about them show clearly how much depends on questions of method.

This article considers the two inscriptions in turn, describing their discovery, physical form, contents and interpretation, and then sets out the main positions in the debates about their date and language. It does not attempt to resolve those debates. Its purpose is to present the evidence and the principal arguments fairly, to indicate where the specialists agree and where they differ, and to explain why the answers matter for the study of the transmission of the biblical text. The discussion complements the articles on this site concerning other early inscriptions, including the Mesha Stele, the Siloam inscription and the Ketef Hinnom silver scrolls, all of which belong to later centuries, and the recent article on the Deir Alla inscription.

Gezer and the excavations of the Palestine Exploration Fund

Gezer lies on the western edge of the Judaean foothills, where the hill country meets the coastal plain, on a natural route between the coast and the interior. It appears in the Hebrew Bible as a Canaanite city whose king was defeated by Joshua, and as a city that later came into Israelite hands when an Egyptian pharaoh captured it and gave it to Solomon as a dowry; the same passage records that Solomon rebuilt it.³ From 1902 to 1905 and again from 1907 to 1909 the site was excavated on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund by the Irish archaeologist R. A. Stewart Macalister, who reported regularly on his work in the Fund’s Quarterly Statement.⁴ Macalister’s methods, which involved cutting long trenches across the mound and backfilling each in turn, were common for their time but have been criticised by later archaeologists because they made it difficult to relate objects precisely to the layers in which they were found.

The tablet that became known as the Gezer Calendar was found in 1908. It is a small piece of soft limestone, roughly eleven centimetres high and seven wide, with a smoothed face on which seven lines of text were incised with a sharp point. The lower part of the tablet is damaged. A hole near the top edge has been interpreted as a means of hanging it. The tablet passed, with other finds of the period, to the imperial museum in Constantinople, and it is now in the collections of the Istanbul Archaeology Museums.⁵ Because it was not found in a sealed stratigraphic context, its date has always depended chiefly on the forms of its letters and on comparison with other inscriptions, a point to which the discussion returns below.

The text of the Gezer Calendar

The text was first published in January 1909 by the Semitist Mark Lidzbarski in the Quarterly Statement, under the title “An Old Hebrew Calendar-Inscription from Gezer”.⁶ Gustaf Dalman and Lidzbarski himself published further notes later in the same year, and from that point onward the tablet became a standard item in handbooks of North-West Semitic epigraphy.⁷ The text consists of a list of months, each assigned to an agricultural activity. In the reading now generally adopted, it begins with two months of ingathering, followed by two months of sowing and two months of late sowing. There follow a month of hoeing or pulling flax, a month of barley harvest, and a month of harvest and measuring, after which come two months of pruning vines and a month of summer fruit.⁸ Taken together, the entries account for twelve months and follow the agricultural year of the southern Levant from the autumn olive harvest through to the summer.

Several features of the text remain debated. The word usually translated “two months” ends in a form that some scholars interpret as a dual and others as a noun with a pronominal suffix, and the interpretation of this form bears directly on the question of language.⁹ The meaning of individual agricultural terms has been compared with Hebrew and with other Semitic languages. On the left margin, written vertically, a few letters have been read as a personal name, often restored as Abiyah or Abi, which may be the name of the writer.¹⁰ Albright, who published a detailed study of the tablet in 1943, observed that the surface appeared to have been prepared for writing more than once, and he and others proposed that the tablet was a school exercise or a writing tablet on which a pupil practised a familiar text.¹¹ Others have suggested that the list was a popular mnemonic, a song or a practical record. The evidence for these explanations is indirect, and no single interpretation is universally accepted.¹²

The agricultural year in the Gezer Calendar and the Bible

The sequence of seasons in the Gezer Calendar can be compared with the agricultural references in the Hebrew Bible. The festival calendars of Exodus name a feast of harvest, at the time of the first fruits of the fields, and a feast of ingathering at the end of the year, when the produce of the fields is gathered in. The Hebrew word for ingathering in these passages, ’asip, is the same word that most scholars read at the beginning of the Gezer list.¹³ The correspondence does not imply any literary connection between the tablet and the biblical laws, but it shows that the two reflect the same agricultural year, beginning in the autumn with the gathering of fruit and olives and moving through the sowing of grain in the winter rains to the harvests of spring and early summer.

The biblical narratives of the monarchy also preserve a small number of older month names, distinct from the Babylonian names used in later Jewish tradition. The account of the building of Solomon’s temple in 1 Kings dates its stages by the months Ziv, Bul and Ethanim, and explains them by reference to the later numbered months.¹⁴ These names, like the seasonal terms of the Gezer Calendar, belong to an older stratum of the calendar of the southern Levant, and some of them are attested in Phoenician inscriptions. The Gezer list itself names no months; it describes them by their work. It therefore illustrates a way of reckoning the year that was rooted in agriculture rather than in astronomy or administration, and it has been used by historians of the region as evidence for the rhythms of rural life in the early Iron Age.

The date and language of the Gezer Calendar

Albright dated the tablet to the late tenth century BC on the basis of its letter forms, and he regarded its language as Hebrew. His dating has been widely followed in general reference works, which often describe the tablet as belonging to the tenth century.¹⁵ Because of the uncertain archaeological context, however, the palaeographic argument carries most of the weight, and specialists have noted that the letter forms of the tablet are not yet distinctively Hebrew. They belong to the common linear alphabet used in the tenth century across the Levant, the script from which the later Phoenician, Hebrew and Aramaic scripts developed.¹⁶

The language of the Gezer Calendar has been debated more vigorously than its date. The text is short and contains few features that distinguish one North-West Semitic language from another. The classification depends largely on a small number of forms, notably the ending of the word for “months”, whose interpretation differs between those who regard the language as Hebrew and those who regard it as Phoenician or as an undifferentiated form of Canaanite. In 2013 Dennis Pardee set out a detailed case for regarding the language as Phoenician, arguing that the forms best explained as Hebrew could equally or more naturally be explained within Phoenician grammar.¹⁷ Other scholars continue to regard the text as an early form of Hebrew or as belonging to a stage of the language before the distinctive features of the later dialects had developed. The question cannot be settled on the basis of the tablet alone.¹⁸

The debate is not merely technical. If the Gezer Calendar is Hebrew, it is among the earliest witnesses to the language in written form. If it is Phoenician, it shows that a coastal language and its writing conventions were in use in the foothills of Judah in the tenth century. In either case, the tablet attests to the existence of a writing tradition in the region at an early date and to the practice of writing ordinary lists on durable materials. It also illustrates the difficulty of assigning a language to a short text written in a common script, a difficulty that recurs in the discussion of the Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon.

Khirbet Qeiyafa and its excavation

Khirbet Qeiyafa is a hilltop site of a little over two hectares on the northern side of the Valley of Elah, between the biblical sites of Azekah and Socoh. It occupies a strategic position on routes leading from the coastal plain into the hill country.¹⁹ Excavations began in 2007 under the direction of Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Saar Ganor of the Israel Antiquities Authority. The excavators uncovered a massive casemate wall built of large stones enclosing the summit, two gates, and buildings adjoining the inner face of the wall. They argued that the site had been occupied for a brief period in the early Iron Age IIA, that it was planned and fortified as a single enterprise, and that its inhabitants were Judahite rather than Philistine or Canaanite.²⁰ In a preliminary report published in 2008, they proposed that the site should be identified with the biblical town of Sha’arayim, a name meaning “two gates”, which appears in the account of David and Goliath.²¹

The ostracon was found in July 2008 during the second season of excavation, on the floor of a building near the western gate. It is a piece of a pottery vessel, measuring about fifteen by sixteen and a half centimetres, on the inner face of which five lines of text were written in black ink. The writing was not noticed until the sherd was washed, a routine procedure in which ink inscriptions are sometimes discovered and sometimes, unfortunately, destroyed.²² The ink was faint and the surface partly worn, so that from the beginning many letters could be read only with difficulty. Photographs, including multispectral images, were taken to enhance the legibility of the text, and the initial reading was published by the epigrapher Haggai Misgav with the excavators.²³

The reading of the ostracon

The reading of the Qeiyafa ostracon has proved exceptionally difficult. The letters are written in the early linear alphabet, and their forms are not always consistent. Even the direction of writing was discussed in the early literature, because some letters face in one direction and some in the other, a feature common in the early alphabet before the direction of writing was fixed. The number of letters that can be identified with confidence is limited, and the division of the text into words is often uncertain.²⁴ Within a short time, several scholars had proposed readings and translations that differed substantially from one another.

Some readings emphasised words that could be understood as verbs of doing and as nouns for judging, the slave, the widow, the orphan and the stranger. On such readings the text resembled a declaration of social obligations, comparable in theme with passages in the biblical law codes and prophetic books. Other readings interpreted the text as a list of names, perhaps of persons or places, or as an administrative or judicial note.²⁵ Bob Becking and Paul Sanders examined the proposed readings in 2010 and questioned whether the text could be shown to express an ethical programme, arguing that the readings on which such interpretations depended were too uncertain to support them.²⁶ Alan Millard, writing in 2011, surveyed the proposals and emphasised that the ostracon showed writing to have been practised at the site, while acknowledging that its content remained unclear.²⁷

The most extensive methodological critique was offered by Christopher Rollston, also in 2011. Rollston argued that the script of the ostracon was best described as early alphabetic or Phoenician script rather than as a distinctively Hebrew script, since the national scripts of the Levant had not yet diverged at the period in question. He also argued that the language of the text could not be determined with confidence, because the words that could be read were common to more than one North-West Semitic language. He warned against using the ostracon as evidence for particular historical claims about the early monarchy when its reading remained so uncertain.²⁸ Rollston’s article did not deny that the ostracon might be Hebrew, but it maintained that the evidence did not allow that conclusion to be drawn with the confidence with which it had sometimes been stated.

Later work has continued to refine the reading. In 2016 Eythan Levy and Frédéric Pluquet published computational experiments on the ostracon, testing proposed readings against the shapes of the surviving traces.²⁹ In 2022 Brian Donnelly-Lewis published a new collation based on the multispectral images, with a fresh transcription, translation and commentary; his study reduced the number of letters he regarded as secure and offered revised readings of several lines.³⁰ The fact that a text discovered in 2008 still receives substantially different readings illustrates how difficult early alphabetic inscriptions can be to read and how cautiously they must be used as historical evidence.³¹

The dating debate

The date of the ostracon depends on the date of the stratum in which it was found, and here the debate becomes part of a much wider argument about the chronology of the Iron Age in the southern Levant. Garfinkel, Ganor and their colleagues obtained radiocarbon dates from burnt olive pits found in the destruction layer of the Iron Age city. They published two series of results, in 2012 and 2015, and concluded that the city had been occupied for a short time in the late eleventh and early tenth centuries BC, approximately in the first quarter of the tenth century.³²³³ On this basis they argued that the city belonged to the period traditionally assigned to King David and that it provided evidence for a centralised Judahite state at that time.³⁴

Israel Finkelstein and Eli Piasetzky accepted the general range of the radiocarbon results but interpreted them differently. In 2010 they argued that the dates were consistent with the transition between the Iron I and the Iron IIA periods and did not require the association of the site with a particular king.³⁵ In 2015 they offered a Bayesian model of the dates from Khirbet Qeiyafa and other sites in the Shephelah, arguing for a somewhat later range and for an interpretation in which the site was not necessarily connected with Judah.³⁶ The difference between the two positions concerns not only the dates themselves but the method of modelling them, the relation between radiocarbon dates and historical reigns, and the wider chronology of the Iron Age, which has been debated for many years under the name of the “low chronology”.³⁷

The ethnic and political identity of the site is also disputed. The excavators argued that the absence of pig bones, the layout of the buildings and the character of the pottery indicated a Judahite settlement.³⁸ Nadav Na’aman, among others, argued that the evidence was compatible with a different identification and proposed that the site should be associated with another political entity of the region rather than with Judah; his 2017 article set out the case against regarding it as a Judahite city.³⁹ These arguments affect the interpretation of the ostracon because the identity of the writers and readers of the text bears on the question of its language.

The Valley of Elah and the biblical setting

Much of the public interest in Khirbet Qeiyafa arose from its location. The biblical account of the combat between David and Goliath places the Philistine camp between Socoh and Azekah, and the Israelite camp in the Valley of Elah, and Khirbet Qeiyafa overlooks that valley between those two sites.⁴⁰ At the end of the narrative the fleeing Philistines are said to have fallen on the road to Sha’arayim, a town also listed among the towns of the Shephelah in the book of Joshua.⁴¹ The excavators drew attention to the two gates they had found at Khirbet Qeiyafa, an unusual feature for a small site, and proposed that the name Sha’arayim, “two gates”, reflected that feature.⁴²

The identification has been accepted by some scholars and rejected by others. Its critics have pointed out that biblical place names cannot be assigned to excavated sites on the basis of a single feature, that the list in Joshua may reflect a later period, and that the narrative of David and Goliath has its own complex literary history, which includes a substantially shorter form in the Old Greek translation of 1 Samuel. The identification of the site therefore remains one proposal among several, and it does not by itself bear on the date or reading of the ostracon.⁴³ The case illustrates the risk, frequently noted in the methodological literature, of allowing the geography of a biblical narrative to determine the interpretation of archaeological finds rather than allowing the finds to be interpreted on their own terms first.

Writing materials and the survival of early texts

The two inscriptions also illustrate the effect of writing materials on the survival of evidence. The Gezer Calendar was incised in stone, and the Qeiyafa text was written in ink on a sherd, a cheap and readily available surface widely used for short notes, letters and accounts throughout the Iron Age. Longer texts, including literary and religious compositions, were more probably written on papyrus or prepared skin, which rarely survive in the climate of the southern Levant except in very dry places such as the caves of the Judaean Desert. Seal impressions on clay bullae from the later Iron Age, some still bearing the imprint of papyrus fibres on their reverse, show that documents on papyrus were in common use, even though the documents themselves have perished.

This imbalance means that the surviving inscriptions are not a representative sample of what was written. Short texts on stone and pottery are over-represented, and long texts on perishable materials are almost entirely lost. Arguments from the scarcity of inscriptions in a given period must therefore be made with care. The small number of tenth-century texts may reflect a limited use of writing, as some scholars have argued, or it may reflect the poor survival of the materials on which most writing was done, or both. The discovery of several early inscriptions in the Shephelah within a few years, at Tel Zayit and Khirbet Qeiyafa, has led some scholars to suggest that further finds can be expected, while others caution that the overall picture of limited literacy is unlikely to change substantially.⁴⁴

The ’Išba‘al inscription

In 2015 the excavators published a second inscription from Khirbet Qeiyafa, written on a storage jar and containing a personal name read as ’Išba‘al son of Beda‘. The name ’Išba‘al recalls the name of a son of Saul in the biblical narrative, although the excavators did not identify the two, and the name was probably not uncommon in the period.⁴⁵ The inscription was written in the same early alphabetic script as the ostracon. Its discovery strengthened the evidence for the use of writing at the site and provided further material for the study of the script of the period, although, like the ostracon, its significance for historical reconstruction depends on the dating and identification of the site.

The Tel Zayit abecedary and other early inscriptions

The two inscriptions discussed here are part of a small group of early alphabetic texts from the southern Levant that have been associated with the tenth century BC. Among them is an abecedary found in 2005 at Tel Zayit, in the Judaean Shephelah, built into a wall. Its publication by Ron Tappy, P. Kyle McCarter and colleagues in 2008 provided a further example of the alphabet in use in the region at an early date.⁴⁶ The order of letters in the Tel Zayit abecedary differs slightly from the later standard order, a feature also found in other early abecedaries. Abecedaries are often interpreted as scribal exercises, and they provide evidence for the transmission of the alphabet through training rather than for the use of writing in particular genres.

The interpretation of these texts raises the question of what is meant by “Hebrew writing”. If the term refers to the language, then the classification of each text depends on a small number of linguistic features, and many early texts are too short or too damaged to permit a firm judgement. If the term refers to the script, then it is generally agreed that a distinctively Hebrew script developed only later, probably during the ninth century, from the common linear alphabet of the tenth century. If the term refers to texts written by people who regarded themselves as belonging to Israel or Judah, then the question becomes one of the identification of sites and populations, which is itself debated.⁴⁷

What the inscriptions show

Despite the uncertainties, several conclusions can be drawn with reasonable confidence. The first is that alphabetic writing was in use in the southern Levant in the tenth century BC, including in the region later occupied by the kingdom of Judah. The Gezer Calendar, the Qeiyafa ostracon, the ’Išba‘al inscription and the Tel Zayit abecedary together show that writing was practised for lists, names, exercises and possibly longer texts.⁴⁸ The second is that the writing of the period used a common script that had not yet diverged into the national scripts of later centuries. This means that the script alone cannot identify the language or the ethnic affiliation of the writer.⁴⁹

The third conclusion is that the number of texts is small and their interpretation difficult. Claims that these inscriptions confirm or refute particular biblical narratives require more than the inscriptions themselves can supply. The excavators of Khirbet Qeiyafa have argued that the site and its inscriptions support the existence of a Judahite state in the time of David; their critics have argued that the evidence does not require this conclusion and can be interpreted in other ways.⁵⁰⁵¹ The debate is likely to continue as further excavations, radiocarbon dates and readings become available.

The inscriptions and the history of the biblical text

For the history of the transmission of the biblical text, these inscriptions are significant less for their content than for what they reveal about the conditions of writing in the period. The Hebrew Bible contains narratives set in the tenth century and earlier, and the question of when such narratives were first written has long been debated. The existence of writing in the tenth century does not show that any biblical text was written at that time, but it does show that the means of writing were available and that scribes were being trained in the region.⁵² The development of a distinctively Hebrew script in the ninth century, attested in inscriptions such as the Mesha Stele and in the later Hebrew inscriptions of the eighth and seventh centuries, provides the background for the composition and transmission of written texts in Israel and Judah.

The inscriptions also illustrate the processes by which the script of the biblical text changed over time. The early linear alphabet of the tenth century developed into the palaeo-Hebrew script used in the monarchy, which in turn was largely replaced in the Second Temple period by the square script derived from Aramaic. The square script is the script of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the medieval codices and the printed Hebrew Bible. Some Dead Sea Scrolls retain palaeo-Hebrew letters for the divine name, and the Samaritan community preserved a form of the palaeo-Hebrew script for its Pentateuch. The history of these changes, and the scribal practices associated with them, is part of the history of the transmission of the biblical text.

Finally, the debates about these inscriptions illustrate the importance of method in the interpretation of ancient evidence. The reading of an inscription, the dating of a stratum and the identification of a language each involve judgements that can be made with varying degrees of confidence. The value of the scholarly debate lies in its insistence that such judgements be made explicit and tested against the evidence. The Gezer Calendar has been studied for more than a century and the Qeiyafa ostracon for more than fifteen years, and both continue to yield new observations as methods improve.⁵³

Assessment

The Gezer Calendar and the Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon are two of the most frequently cited early inscriptions from the southern Levant, and each has been described at different times as the oldest Hebrew inscription. The Gezer Calendar, found in 1908 and published in 1909, is a short list of agricultural seasons whose script belongs to the common linear alphabet of the tenth century and whose language is debated between Hebrew and Phoenician.⁵⁴⁵⁵ The Qeiyafa ostracon, found in 2008, is a longer but far less legible text whose reading, language and date have all been disputed, and whose site has been interpreted both as a Judahite fortress of the early monarchy and as a settlement of uncertain affiliation.⁵⁶⁵⁷

Both inscriptions show that alphabetic writing was practised in the region in the tenth century, and both illustrate the difficulty of assigning a language or an ethnic identity to short texts written in a common script. Neither preserves any part of the biblical text, and neither can by itself settle questions about the historicity of biblical narratives. Their importance for the history of the Hebrew Bible lies in what they reveal about the beginnings of the scribal tradition from which the biblical text, its script and its methods of transmission eventually emerged, and in the example they provide of careful and contested scholarly reasoning about fragmentary evidence.

Notes

1. “Gezer calendar”, Grokipedia; Mark Lidzbarski, “An Old Hebrew Calendar-Inscription from Gezer”, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 41 (1909), pp. 26–34. ↩
2. “Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon”, Grokipedia; Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor, “Khirbet Qeiyafa: Sha‘arayim”, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 8 (2008). ↩
3. Joshua 10:33; 1 Kings 9:15–17. ↩
4. R. A. S. Macalister, “Gezer and Taanach”, PEFQS 38 (1906), pp. 115–120; “Gezer calendar”, Grokipedia. ↩
5. “Gezer calendar”, Grokipedia. ↩
6. Mark Lidzbarski, “An Old Hebrew Calendar-Inscription from Gezer”, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 41 (1909), pp. 26–34. ↩
7. Gustaf Dalman, “Notes on the Old Hebrew Calendar-Inscription from Gezer”, PEFQS 41 (1909), pp. 118–119; Lidzbarski, “The Old Hebrew Calendar-Inscription from Gezer”, ibid., pp. 194–195. ↩
8. “Gezer calendar”, Grokipedia. ↩
9. W. F. Albright, “The Gezer Calendar”, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 92 (1943), pp. 16–26. ↩
10. “Gezer calendar”, Grokipedia. ↩
11. W. F. Albright, “The Gezer Calendar”, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 92 (1943), pp. 16–26. ↩
12. W. F. Albright, “The Gezer Calendar”, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 92 (1943), pp. 16–26; “Gezer calendar”, Grokipedia. ↩
13. Exodus 23:16; Exodus 34:22. ↩
14. 1 Kings 6:1, 6:37–38 and 8:2. ↩
15. W. F. Albright, “The Gezer Calendar”, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 92 (1943), pp. 16–26. ↩
16. Dennis Pardee, “A Brief Case for Phoenician as the Language of the ‘Gezer Calendar’”, in Robert D. Holmstedt and Aaron Schade (eds), Linguistic Studies in Phoenician (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2013), pp. 226–246. ↩
17. Dennis Pardee, “A Brief Case for Phoenician as the Language of the ‘Gezer Calendar’”, in Robert D. Holmstedt and Aaron Schade (eds), Linguistic Studies in Phoenician (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2013), pp. 226–246. ↩
18. Albright, “The Gezer Calendar”; Pardee, “A Brief Case”. ↩
19. “Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon”, Grokipedia. ↩
20. Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor, “Khirbet Qeiyafa: Sha‘arayim”, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 8 (2008). ↩
21. Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor, “Khirbet Qeiyafa: Sha‘arayim”, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 8 (2008). ↩
22. “Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon”, Grokipedia. ↩
23. “Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon”, Grokipedia; Alan Millard, “The Ostracon from the Days of David Found at Khirbet Qeiyafa”, Tyndale Bulletin 62 (2011). ↩
24. “Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon”, Grokipedia; Alan Millard, “The Ostracon from the Days of David Found at Khirbet Qeiyafa”, Tyndale Bulletin 62 (2011). ↩
25. Alan Millard, “The Ostracon from the Days of David Found at Khirbet Qeiyafa”, Tyndale Bulletin 62 (2011). ↩
26. Bob Becking and Paul Sanders, “The Inscription from Khirbet Qeiyafa: Early Evidence for Social Consciousness in Ancient Israel?”, NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion 64 (2010), pp. 238–252. ↩
27. Alan Millard, “The Ostracon from the Days of David Found at Khirbet Qeiyafa”, Tyndale Bulletin 62 (2011). ↩
28. Christopher Rollston, “The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon: Methodological Musings and Caveats”, Tel Aviv 38 (2011), pp. 67–82. ↩
29. Eythan Levy and Frédéric Pluquet, “Computer Experiments on the Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon”, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2016). ↩
30. Brian Donnelly-Lewis, “The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon: A New Collation Based on the Multispectral Images, with Translation and Commentary”, Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research 388 (2022), pp. 181–210. ↩
31. Donnelly-Lewis, “A New Collation”. ↩
32. Yosef Garfinkel, Katharina Streit, Saar Ganor et al., “State Formation in Judah: Biblical Tradition, Modern Historical Theories, and Radiometric Dates at Khirbet Qeiyafa”, Radiocarbon 54 (2012), pp. 359–369. ↩
33. Yosef Garfinkel, Katharina Streit, Saar Ganor et al., “King David’s City at Khirbet Qeiyafa: Results of the Second Radiocarbon Dating Project”, Radiocarbon 57 (2015), pp. 881–890. ↩
34. Yosef Garfinkel, Katharina Streit, Saar Ganor et al., “King David’s City at Khirbet Qeiyafa: Results of the Second Radiocarbon Dating Project”, Radiocarbon 57 (2015), pp. 881–890. ↩
35. Israel Finkelstein and Eli Piasetzky, “Khirbet Qeiyafa: Absolute Chronology”, Tel Aviv 37 (2010), pp. 84–88. ↩
36. Israel Finkelstein and Eli Piasetzky, “Radiocarbon Dating Khirbet Qeiyafa and the Iron I–IIA Phases in the Shephelah: Methodological Comments and a Bayesian Model”, Radiocarbon 57 (2015), pp. 891–907. ↩
37. Finkelstein and Piasetzky, “Absolute Chronology”; Garfinkel et al., “State Formation in Judah”. ↩
38. Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor, “Khirbet Qeiyafa: Sha‘arayim”, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 8 (2008). ↩
39. Nadav Na’aman, “Was Khirbet Qeiyafa a Judahite City? The Case against It”, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 17 (2017). ↩
40. 1 Samuel 17:1–2. ↩
41. 1 Samuel 17:52; Joshua 15:36. ↩
42. Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor, “Khirbet Qeiyafa: Sha‘arayim”, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 8 (2008). ↩
43. Garfinkel and Ganor, “Khirbet Qeiyafa: Sha‘arayim”; Na’aman, “Was Khirbet Qeiyafa a Judahite City?”. ↩
44. Rollston, “Methodological Musings”; Millard, “Ostracon from the Days of David”. ↩
45. Yosef Garfinkel, Mitka R. Golub, Haggai Misgav et al., “The ’Išba‘al Inscription from Khirbet Qeiyafa”, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 373 (2015), pp. 217–233. ↩
46. Ron E. Tappy and P. Kyle McCarter (eds), Literate Culture and Tenth-Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008); see the review by Gary A. Rendsburg, BASOR 359 (2010), pp. 89–91. ↩
47. Rollston, “Methodological Musings”; Millard, “Ostracon from the Days of David”. ↩
48. Ron E. Tappy and P. Kyle McCarter (eds), Literate Culture and Tenth-Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008); see the review by Gary A. Rendsburg, BASOR 359 (2010), pp. 89–91. ↩
49. Christopher Rollston, “The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon: Methodological Musings and Caveats”, Tel Aviv 38 (2011), pp. 67–82. ↩
50. Yosef Garfinkel, Katharina Streit, Saar Ganor et al., “King David’s City at Khirbet Qeiyafa: Results of the Second Radiocarbon Dating Project”, Radiocarbon 57 (2015), pp. 881–890. ↩
51. Nadav Na’aman, “Was Khirbet Qeiyafa a Judahite City? The Case against It”, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 17 (2017). ↩
52. Alan Millard, “The Ostracon from the Days of David Found at Khirbet Qeiyafa”, Tyndale Bulletin 62 (2011). ↩
53. Donnelly-Lewis, “A New Collation”. ↩
54. “Gezer calendar”, Grokipedia; Mark Lidzbarski, “An Old Hebrew Calendar-Inscription from Gezer”, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 41 (1909), pp. 26–34. ↩
55. Dennis Pardee, “A Brief Case for Phoenician as the Language of the ‘Gezer Calendar’”, in Robert D. Holmstedt and Aaron Schade (eds), Linguistic Studies in Phoenician (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2013), pp. 226–246. ↩
56. “Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon”, Grokipedia; Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor, “Khirbet Qeiyafa: Sha‘arayim”, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 8 (2008). ↩
57. Nadav Na’aman, “Was Khirbet Qeiyafa a Judahite City? The Case against It”, Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 17 (2017). ↩