Thursday, June 25, 2015

More on the New Hebrew Inscription

As a follow-up on my post of yesterday, I saw this post by Christopher Rollston where he comes to the same conclusion about what the new inscriptions mean (I cite only the fourth of his six observations):
(4) The script of this inscription is that of a trained scribal professional. There is no doubt about this. The morphology of the letters was executed with precision and deftness. The spacing between words was careful and precise. The word dividers were nicely done and consistent. This inscription constitutes further evidence for the presence of trained scribal professionals in the southern Levant during the late 11th and early 10th centuries BCE (see Rollston 2006 for primary and secondary literature on scribalism and scribal education during the 9th through 6th centuries BCE). Those who wish to argue that there were no trained scribal professionals in ancient Israel and Judah during the 10th and 9th centuries continue to find themselves defending a position that is flying in the face of the epigraphic evidence for the entire southern Levant.