The Oldest Text
| Khirbet Qeiyafa | 31 41 46.68N 34 57 27E | The circle of wall can be clearly seen from a distant view, but this is not the best picture on Google Earth and if you zoom in closer there is only blur to be seen. |
One of the highlights of each year's Diggings Tour is the trip to our excavation site at Beit Guvrin. After saying goodbye to our new friends who are returning home we board our bus and head down the road from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, passing the remains of a convoy destroyed by an Arab ambush during the 1948 War of Independence We emerge from the hills onto the coastal plain and immediately leave the highway and head south down a smaller road.
We see, but don't stop, Beth Shemesh, the "House of the Sun", where the cattle drawing the Ark of the Covenant halted after the Philistines had captured the Ark. After a single stop, which I'll describe in a moment, we pass the remains of a Roman road where Jewish terrorists lurked in caves to ambush travellers in the run-up to the Bar Kochba revolt and finaly see the impressive hill of Maresha towering above us on the left while we turn right past the large amphitheatre of Eleutheropolis to enter Kibbutz Beit Guvrin, where we will be staying while we excavate.
The single stop is at a pretty nondescript culvert over a dry stream bed - but the valley in which we find ourselves is the Valley of Elah, and the bank on which we are standing was once crowded with Philistine troops who jeered and hooted at the Israelite troops on the further bank as the Philistine champion, a tall man named Goliath, roared his defiance at Israel. As we all get down from the bus the tour leader, usually David Down, points to the stream bed and urges us to go and find "the actual stone" used by David to kill Goliath.
Of course we all know that it is a bit of fun - the original stone has long since been washed down to sea or carried away by David himself as a souvenir - but it is a sarcastic comment on the holy sites we have seen which claim to be the "exact spot" or the "actual ..." and as an opportunity to stretch our legs we all enjoy wandering down to the wadi and returning with a couple of rounded stones apiece as presents for relatives back home.
What none of us realised was that if we had wandered a little further up the wadi - three quarters of a mile, to be exact - and then climbed up into the hills a mere furlong further, we would have come to the impressive stone wall that still surrounds Khirbet Qeiyafa.
Not that we would have been terribly interested if we had; before excavations started in 2007 the site was tentatively identified with Biblical Azekah, mentioned in the Lachish Letters. To be honest, now that the site has been excavated and more firmly identified as Sha'arayim. Sha'arayim is only mentioned three times in the Bible, twice in lists of cities belonging to the diferent tribes and once in connection with the story of David and Goliath, where it says that the fleeing Philistines escaped down "the road of Sha'arayim".
Interestingly, 1 Chronicles 4:31 states that Sha'arayim and a couple of other cities "were their cities unto the reign of David" and the archaeological evidence shows that Sha'arayim was occupied for as little as twenty years, and C-14 analysis of two burned olive stones dates them to between 1050 and 970 B.C. Biblical data place David's reign at 1010-970 BC, so the dates fit.
Which is a problem for those who tell us that David, if there was any such individual, was nothing more than a minor tribal chieftan, that Israel was at best an informal alliance between Canaanite tribes, and that the Bible was written by Ezra and his fellow scribes after the Babylonian exile.
In the second season of excavations a teenage volunteer spotted a piece of broken pottery approximately 4 inches square on which was writing in ink. (The story of the find is told in detail in our article of November 20, 2009.) The latest announcement is that Professor Gershon Galil of the University of Haifa has completed his decipherment of the text and declares that it is, indeed, Hebrew, rather than any other language.
This is not surprising: the pottery found at Khirbet Qeiyafa differs from that at Gath, a mere seven miles away. In addition, although this is still early days, the evidence we have regarding the diet of the inhabitants of Khirbet Qeiyafa supports the Hebrew identification. Philistine sites have dog and pig bones, as both animals featured on Goliath's menu, but none of those have been found at Khirbet Qeiyafa.
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| Professor Galil's reconstruction of the text on the Khirbet Qeiyafaf ostracon. The image is courtesy of the University of Haifa. |
In the image on the right we have Professor Galil's reconstruction of the text. The outlines are the letters that he has completed or suggested in order to make sense of the text; the solid black letters are those which remain on the ostracon and can be clearly identified. It will be obvious that Galil's reconstruction is not without its problems, particularly in the third and fifth lines, where more than half the letters are outlines. Nonetheless he is confident enough of his conclusions to publish them.
His identification of the text as Hebrew is based on a couple of verbs which are peculiar to Hebrew and are only rarely used by other Semitic languages in the area. For example, asah "did" and adah "worked". Even more definite is the noun almanah "widow" which is never used in non-Hebrew languages. Taken together with the fact that the text was found in a location that appears to be Israelite, Professor Galil has no doubts that this is the oldest Hebrew text in existence.
This is his translation of the text:
1 You shall not do [it], but worship the [Lord].
2 Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow], judge the orph[an]
3 [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant, plead for the po[or and]
4 the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king.
5 Protect the po[or and] the slave, [supp]ort the stranger.
There are two things which stand out about this text. The first is the mention of a king; according to Israel Finkelstein and his school there was no king at the time and no nation of Israel. Yet here we have a reference to a king as the arbiter of justice on behalf of the weak elements in society - the orphan, the widow, the poor, the slave and the stranger.
The archaeology of the site points in the same direction. The wall surrounding Khirbet Qeiyafa is made up of stones weighing between 4 and 5 tons each while the gate uses stones weighing 10 tons. It is estimated that 200,000 tons of stone were required for the wall and such a massive construction points to a centralised authority that could the resources and man-power to create it. No tribal chieftan could have constructed such a wall.
The second thing which stands out is the concern for the widow and orphan (and other disadvantaged members of society). If this text was written by or for a prophet, his theme is in stark contrast to religious writings from other nations, which dealt with the myths of the gods or the details of the rituals with which they were worshipped. If, on the other hand, it was written by or for the king, then it is still a contrast with other royal edicts of the time, which concerned themselves with defence or the gathering of taxes.
What is interesting is that the earliest documents in the Bible - the books of Moses - reveal just such a concern with justice for the poorer elements in society, a theme that was continued in all the prophets down to the end of the Old Testament. In other words, not only is the writing Hebrew (proto-Canaanite, if you want the technical term) and the language Hebrew, but the subject matter is also characteristically Hebrew.
Finally, the language itself is interesting. The Hebrew Scriptures are unique among ancient documents for their easy narrative and flowing style. It is no dennigration to suggest that the form in which we have them has doubtless been polished and improved by editors and copyists over the years, for the style is still unique. Yet this text appears to have many of the characteristics of the typical Hebrew style, a fact which undermines those who claim that the Bible could not have been written until the Hellenistic period.
The excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa are continuing and details of the 2010 season can be found at the Qeiyafa Project website, including details of how you can volunteer to take part in this exciting dig.
Sha'arayim The name means "two gates" and the identification of the site rests mainly on the fact that it is unusual among ancient cities in having two gates! Even towns as large as Lachish only had a single gateway. The other factor aiding identification is the nearby location of Sucoh and Azekah, mentioned as neighbours of Sha'arayim in the Biblical record. Return
© Kendall K. Down 2010
