mar 1, 1000 BC - Paleo-Hebrew alphabet

Description:

Paleo-Hebrew was the ancient Hebrew script used by Israelites during the monarchic period. It was closely related to Phoenician writing and was used in inscriptions, seals, ostraca, and probably early written biblical traditions.

This script is important because it represents the original visual form of ancient Hebrew before Jews later adopted the square Aramaic-style Hebrew script. It connects the language directly to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

Tel Zayit Abecedary

A limestone boulder discovered on the last day of the 2005 excavation season at Tel Zayit, in the Beth Guvrin region of the Shephelah, with a bowl-shaped hollow ground into one face and two lines of alphabetic writing incised into the other — a complete twenty-two-letter abecedary, the fullest one yet recovered from a stratified tenth-century context in Israel. The stone had been reused as building material in a wall, so it was not in its original setting; excavator Ron Tappy has suggested it may have been set into the wall deliberately, since the alphabet was widely credited with protective power.
Eisenbrauns
Wikipedia

Its value is that it fixes the shape of the letters at a moment when the alphabet was still taking form. The signs stand between the older Proto-Canaanite forms and the Paleo-Hebrew script familiar from later Judahite inscriptions, and the letters appear essentially in the traditional sequence, though pe precedes ayin — the same order preserved in several biblical acrostics and in other pre-exilic abecedaries from the Land of Israel. Tel Zayit sat on the frontier between the Judean hills and Philistia, and the presence of a scribal exercise at such a site points to writing being taught and practiced beyond the major centers.

How much it proves is contested. Tappy and P. Kyle McCarter read the script as a southern inland variety pointing toward an emerging Israelite scribal tradition; Christopher Rollston argues the letters are Phoenician rather than distinctively Hebrew, and that a single abecedary cannot support conclusions about how widespread literacy was or who was doing the writing. The stratigraphy of the site and the precise date of the inscription both remain debated, which limits how directly it can be tied to any particular political situation in the tenth century.

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