Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 9:37 PM, Ted Walther wrote:

>  The professor wasn't claiming it was paleo-Hebrew.  Nor was he claiming
>  anything older than 1500 years for the inscription.  Vocalization marks
>  were around 1500 years ago weren't they?

So what if he wasn't claiming it was or was not.  Authenticity is not just a
consideration of whether all these elements could exist at that time.  It also
requires a plausible context and whether particular elements were in use
together.  It's not just that Paleo-Hebrew script, vocalization, and Greek
were not used together, but even whether specific letter forms were in use
at the same time (since letters evolve over time).  Cyrus Gordon is the only
main expert on Hebrew epigraphy that actually thought it was authentic.
He passed away.  All modern experts agree the inscription is not authentic.
As for context, Jews and Samaritans do not leave inscriptions on rocks in
mountains.

>  Barry Fell said the vocalization marks present on the Los Lunas stone
>  are consistent with paleo-Hebrew.

Barry Fell is not an authority on epigraphy either.

>  I don't care about authenticity so much; I just want to know how far the
>  text on the stone differs from the text we have in our modern Bibles.

Why do you want to transcribe on people's homes the text that some 20th
century person wrote on a rock in an attempt to forge an ancient inscription?

Yitzhak Sapir