Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Yitzhak:
Thanks for the news.

Did you read the stone?

I tried to, but I found most of the top line illegible, and some letters
through the rest of the stone also illegible. But I was able to read most.

One thing I noticed, in view of discussions we have had in the past, is that
materes lectionis are found in this inscription, at about the same frequency
as in Hebrew from the same time period (as dated by tradition).

Even though the image you linked to is pretty clear, it is only about half
the size of the original, and I wonder if it would have been more legible
had it been full size? Was it published to excite people to come to the
presentation? Now having seen it, I wish I could be in attendance.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>wrote:

> Although not in Hebrew, the Zincirli stela that was discovered earlier this
> year
> is now placed online:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/science/18soul.html?_r=2&8dpc
> http://oihistory.blogspot.com/2008/03/oriental-institute-in-news.html
> http://news.uchicago.edu/images/assets/soul_in_the_stone.jpg
>
> The paper quotes Pardee to the effect that "nabsh" is Aramaic.  In
> fact, it is more
> accurate to say that standard Biblical Hebrew has "nefesh" and
> Zincirli Aramaic has
> "nabsh."  But nb$ in this sense also occurs on one of the Arad ostraca.
>
> Anyway, there are frequent complaints here that high resolution photographs
> are
> not published soon enough.  Here, we have a very readable high resolution
> photograph published days before the official presentation at the SBL, and
> less
> than 4 months after the inscription's discovery:
>
> SBL23-84
> Paleographical Studies in the Ancient Near East
> 11/23/2008
> 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
> Room: Meeting Room 304 - CC
>
> Dennis Pardee, University of Chicago and David Schloen, University of
> Chicago
> A New Alphabetic Inscription from Zincirli (20 min)
>
> The abstract:
> http://sbl-site.org/meetings/abstract.aspx?id=11885
>
> Yitzhak Sapir