Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 2/8/06, Karl Randolph wrote:

> My complaint is that most of the pictures I have
> found on the internet are of such bad quality that
> I cannot use them as evidence for Hebrew language.
> But there are a few, rare exceptions, that are
> good, and I have referred to this example in the
> past. The language on this stone is not Ugaritic,
> but recognizable Biblical Hebrew. From the shape of
> the letters, I would guess that the inscription is
> late proto-Sinaitic, or maybe even during the early
> transition period between proto-Sinaitic and
> "Phoenician" writing. You can find previous
> references to this stone in b-hebrew archives.

Hello, Karl.

The best thing I found that seems to answer what you
mentioned is:
http://www.viewzone.com/FTscandanavia.html

You mentioned it has a "waw possessive" here:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/b-hebrew/2005-July/024255.html

You gave the link here:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/b-hebrew/attachments/20050726/e0bf4aa0/attachment.bat

And explained a bit more about it here:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/b-hebrew/attachments/20050726/170a4bbc/attachment.bat

So now:
1) That W is not a "waw possessive."  A possessive pronoun does
not occur in words that have a definite article (H) and I am not sure
what a root Hebrew He-Ayin-Dalet would mean.
2) Your reconstruction is not in Hebrew.  Ugaritic is more "Hebrew"
than what you wrote there.
3) It is not in proto-Sinaitic.  I am skeptical how well you can tell
Proto-Sinaitic from other scripts because you've never really
seen any large body of Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, by your own
admission.
4) I am similarly skeptical of your ability to date scripts because
you have no background in paleography and have not seen any
body of inscriptions from Judea or Israel or the nearby states.
5) What happens in your story if the photo is found to be a photo
downloaded off the net and one cannot prove it was actually the
bad camera that shot the photo, so the photo could be a
forgery?

Yitzhak Sapir