In his recent Biblical Archaeology Review article, “Too Good to Be True? Reckoning with Sensational Inscriptions,” epigrapher Christopher Rollston takes to task several recent studies of apparent paleo-Hebrew and proto-Canaanite inscriptions and criticizes some of his fellow epigraphers (myself included) for reading too much into these badly damaged and/or questionable texts. Although I agree with some of his points, with others I clearly cannot. Below I consider two of the texts discussed by Rollston in his article.The main substantive points involve the fishing weight intepretation.[...]
I don't think anyone was ignoring the archaeological context of the lapidary inscription fragment, which was in a fill containing eighth century potsherds, but not a solid stratum. The reason for caution is that there is so little of the fragment.
The lapidary inscription fragments (see links below for specifics) which have undoubted letters on them are probably the remains of official (royal?) inscriptions from around Hezekiah's era. I wouldn't be more specific than that.
For PaleoJudaica posts on the Mount Ebal curse tablet/fishing weight, including my own preliminary assessment, see here and links. For posts on the supposed Hezekiah inscription fragments, as well as some others that Prof. Galil believes he has deciphered, see here, here, and here and links.
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