A New First Temple Hebrew Papyrus

The Israel Antiquities Authority has announced the exciting recovery of a fragment of a Hebrew papyrus letter from the 7th-6th centuries BCE, that was presumably found in the Judea Desert. The backstory is quite intriguing and worth a read. The papyrus was supposedly also radiocarbon dated to around the same period, which lends strong support to its authenticity (there's not much blank papyrus from that period floating around in Israel). This is one of only a very small number of Hebrew papyri with a claim to come from that early, and those who helped bring it to light are to be congratulated.

HT Gary Rendsburg

Shaus et al. on the Writer Identification at Arad

The Tel Aviv team has produced another interesting article on writer identification in the Arad ostraca, this time comparing an analysis by a forensic document examiner with two computer algorithms. The forensic analyst concludes that the 18 samples were written by at least 12 different writers, which implies a proportionally large number of writers at the fort of Arad. The two computer algorithms are more conservative in concluding multiple writers, but provide some additional quantitative support for the FDE's conclusions.

Shaus A, Gerber Y, Faigenbaum-Golovin S, Sober B, Piasetzky E, Finkelstein I (2020) Forensic document examination and algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judahite biblical period inscriptions reveal significant literacy level. PLoS ONE 15(9): e0237962. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237962 

Richelle and Perrot on Paleo-Hebrew Paleography

Matthieu Richelle and Antony Perrot have put up a website to present the data from their forthcoming article on Paleo-Hebrew paleography. I had the opportunity to interact extensively with them at the EAJS lab in Aix-en-Provence and afterwards concerning their work, and I can safely say it makes an important contribution to the study of the Paleo-Hebrew script in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The article is soon to be published in the proceedings volume, where I also have an article on the methods of material reconstruction of fragmentary scrolls. For my own thoughts on Paleo-Hebrew paleography (generally sympathetic to Richelle and Perrot), see Eibert Tigchelaar's and my article on Hebrew and Aramaic paleography in the Textual History of the Bible series.