SLOW NEWS DAY. The Tel Zayit abecedary is covered by the BBC in a brief but accurate article. Personally, I can't see how this inscription bears on the minimalist/maximalist debate. If it is Hebrew script, we already knew that Hebrew was being written in the tenth century BCE from the Gezer Calendar (apparently a scribal exercise). It's interesting that people in Judah could write too and that they even made crude stone inscriptions, but it's not anything surprising.

On a more amusing note, Pravda also has an article on the inscription and, not having access to an actual photo of it, has posted one they made up or got from somewhere else. The photo on the right shows a stone with the Hebrew alphabet carved thereon in six lines in the modern square script, complete with final (sofit) letters. A little misleading, wouldn't you say?



Pravda means "Truth."

UPDATE (14 November): Seth Sanders e-mails:

It's tough to fit the new inscription into the old (and to my mind unhelpful) debates. Crucially, there is no clear evidence that Gezer is in Hebrew, rather than Phoenician or (more likely, I think) an unmarked Canaanite scribal dialect that may not have been what anyone spoke (an argument advanced nicely in Bill Schniedewind's recent book). The case for Gezer's lack of paleographic and dialectal distinctiveness is already laid out in detail in Joseph Naveh's Early History of the Alphabet.

Chris Rollston, who's done the most recent, detailed and comprehensive studies of Iron Age paleography that I'm aware of, isn't convinced it's Hebrew either:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05313/603007.stm

In fact, our teacher and the stone's epigrapher, Kyle McCarter, describes it as "of a Phoenician type" here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4422628.stm

For what it's worth, my contribution to the topic, The Invention of Hebrew and the Formation of Ancient Israel (out next year from U of Illinois) will argue that Hebrew, as a formal written standard, was most probably created in the 8th or 9th century. This isn't to debunk the authenticity of earlier Israelite history--just to suggest that if they wrote it down it was either in Phoenician or a Canaanite variety
not yet defined as "Hebrew."

Stay tuned for the SBL session, folks!