Literate Culture and Tenth-Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context.

• Author: Whisenant, Jessica
• Position: Book review

Literate Culture and Tenth-Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context. Edited by RON E. TAPPY and P. KYLE McCARTER, JR. Winona Lake, Indiana: EISENBRAUNS, 2008. Pp. xii + 140, illus., DVD. $37.50.

The furor created by the discovery in 2005 at Tel Zayit of a linear alphabetic inscription in a stratified tenth-century B.C.E. archaeological context illustrates the exceptional nature of such a find in Israel. The epigraphic record for the tenth century in the central and southern Canaanite interior is woefully sparse. The near lack of any significant writing activity during the tenth century, when combined with a dearth of other archaeological indicators for the presence of social complexity, has led many scholars to question the biblical tradition of a tenth-century Solomonic state encompassing most of modern-day Israel. Such conclusions have in turn led to doubts regarding the tenth-century dating of some of the earliest versions of several biblical texts. If there was no state apparatus, then how could the highly skilled scribal activity required for the creation of such sophisticated source texts be supported?

It would appear to be the hope of most of the contributors to Literate Culture and Tenth-Century Canaan that the discovery of the inscription from Tel Zayit can start to redress this pessimistic appraisal of the epigraphic and archaeological evidence for the presence of literate activity as well as of an Israelite state during the tenth century. The character of the inscription itself is not altogether helpful in this regard: it is an abecedary containing the twenty-two letters of the Northwest Semitic alphabet. The letters were incised into the face of a large limestone boulder which was in turn embedded into the wall of a building in a secondary context. The abecedary therefore has no information to provide regarding who wrote it or why it was written. Moreover, since little linguistic data can be gleaned from an abecedary, it is extremely difficult to ascertain the character of its script (i.e., is it Phoenician or some kind of proto-Hebraic variant?).

The character of the site of Tel Zayit is equally ambiguous. In the Iron Age, the settlement was situated in the southern Shephelah, in a kind of borderland between the hill country to the east (traditional center of the kingdom of Judah) and the cities of the coastal plain to the west (the Philistine centers). The resettlement of the site in the tenth century seems connected...