Karl,First, you evidently don't know what "begging the question" means.
Second, you are trying to argue two different positions. First, you want to say that in the pre-exilic biblical books, matres lectiones were seldom used. But then you want to give evidence of a number of epigraphic texts that have the matres.
To be sure, matres lectiones were employed in the centuries prior to the sixth century, but the evidence is that first they were at the end of the words, then gradually came to be used internally,
and that things really took off around the sixth century. But, you can hardly say that matres lectiones only appear seldom in the pre-exilic biblical texts, when in fact they occur all over the place in great abundance. The fact that they occur in such great quantity is evidence of having undergone a substantial editing process in the exilic and post-exilic periods.
Blessings,Jerry
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