STILL MORE on Khirbet Qeiyafa and its inscription from Bloomberg.com:

Unearthed City Near Jerusalem Revives Debate on Biblical David

By Gwen Ackerman

Dec. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The remains of a walled city over a plain where the Bible claims David killed Goliath; a pottery shard bearing script that experts claim is the oldest Hebrew text ever found; an ancient water tunnel.

Do these support Scripture’s story of King David and his empire? It depends on who you ask. Recent archeological finds have reopened the debate on David and Solomon, whose reigns almost 3,000 years ago as chronicled in the Bible left so little physical proof that scholars like Neil Asher Silberman, a University of Massachusetts historian, question biblical accuracy.

Hebrew University professor Yosef Garfinkel, in an interview, said his findings amid the ruins of a fortified city in Khirbet Qeiyafa, a five-acre site 20 miles west of Jerusalem, support the biblical portrayal of David as a ruler of a kingdom strong enough to field an army. The findings, the most important of which were a second city gate and the shard, dispute claims by some scholars that David was a chieftain of a largely illiterate tribe.

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More along this lines, with nothing much new, then this contrary view:

Hani Nur el-Din, a professor of archaeology at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, said further digging might uncover more gates and dispel biblical links to the site.

“The Israeli archaeologists are always trying to link what they found to the Bible and not to other contemporary historical texts,” said el-Din.

And this on the inscription:

Then there’s the other important finding: a piece of broken pottery inscribed with 50 characters and considered the oldest known example of Hebrew writing. It contains one critical pair of words, “al-ta’as,” or “don’t do,” used exclusively by the Judean tribes, Garfinkel said.

If that phrase is a correct transcription, it, along with the word "land" reported earlier, weaken the possibility that the inscription is a list of names or at least that it is only a list of names. That said, if the words given above are just a bit misreported, perhaps they could be the name ʿAsaʾel, which means "God has done."

One really can't draw conclusions without a full transcription and a good photograph. I hope both are forthcoming soon.

Background here.