The Rise and Fall Of Ancient Israel with Prof. Israel Finkelstein | Ep 14: Writing in Ancient Israel

Nice to see all those graphics and illustrations added so we can see what they are talking about, especially those illustrating the evolution of Ancient Hebrew.

I can’t express how gratefull i am for this interviews being avaiable in YouTube! Greeting from Brazil 🇧🇷❤️

Why don't you publish all the series in one go? The whole series is freely available on Youtube.

Well done. I would make a couple of points. The first point is there was a writing system in the region later known as Isra'el. There are inscriptions in akkadian cuneiform in Hazor, and there are correspondences in cuneiform with cities during the Amarna period. It cannot be ruled out that people like the biblical deborah who lived in the city of Luz (Almond tree, probably symbolic of the divine pair 'l and Asherah) might have been able to read and write cuneiform. In the biblical legend Deborah sat under a palm tree passing judgement, this is also a symbol of Asherah, and Deborah is a topic of the earliest biblical source, so that source might have been originally preserved in cuneiform and later lost. The point of Luz is that its symbolity link it squarely in canaanite culture AND its sits between Ephraim and Yehudah. The second point is Israel is right, protoCanaanite did not form in the mines of south Sinai peninsula, but also gaza is not likely either, since we have production goods from egypt reaching the levant with protoSinaitic, moreover there are traces in phonecia during the early Amarna. In my opinion this script was a shopkeepers script.

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I'm a big fan of Dr. Finkelstein's work. I did want to read an academic that is scholarly like Dr. Finkelstein but one that is pro-Bible. Can anyone recommend someone? Thank you so much.

How was the Torah written down when there was no Hebrew alphabet at that time?

So it seems then that Judah was a very backward place in relation to literacy and the use of writing until after the fall of the northern kingdom (Israel) to the Asyrians. And in the relatiely short period between the fall of Israel and the fall of Judah (to the NeoBabylonians), we see a brief flourishing of literary composition that was then interrupted during the Babylonian Exile until Cyrus conquered Babylon and allowed/sponsored the return of the Judahite elites to Judah. I presume that implies that any/all Judahite content in the Tanakh dates from either the century or so before or the centuries after the Exile - and that any accounts of supposedly early Iron Age (let alone Bronze Age or earlier) events it describes are at best legendary texts containing at most a kernel of historical reality (e.g. the Davidic accounts) or deeply mythic texts (e.g. all of Genesis)...

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