Hebrew Inscription Confirms Biblical Record

Once again, the Bible is right, and the critics are wrong. A pottery shard from the remains of a town dating from the 10th century b.c. has been proven to be written in ancient Hebrew—making it the oldest known Hebrew inscription. Prof. Gershon Galil of the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Haifa translated the text, proving that the Israel of that time was a major nation—not the backwoods tribe that some biblical scholars say it was.

“It can now be maintained that it was highly reasonable that during the 10th century bce, during the reign of King David, there were scribes in Israel who were able to write literary texts and complex historiographies such as the books of Judges and Samuel,” said Galil.

The shard was discovered in an excavation led by Prof. Yosef Garfinkel inside a fortified town on a hilltop near the valley of Elah, where David battled Goliath. The town has a 30-foot-wide gate, a central fortress, and a wall running 2,300 feet in circumference. These fortifications are too elaborate to have been constructed by
the city’s inhabitants, Garfinkel says. They would have required the resources of an organized kingdom, like that of King David. …

Before the shard was translated, archaeologist Aren Maier said it would be “one of the most important texts, without a doubt, in the corpus of Hebrew inscriptions,”
if it could be proven to be Hebrew. Galil concluded that the text was indeed Hebrew as it uses verbs found only in the
Hebrew language, and it contains material only relevant to an Israelite culture.

“This text is a social statement, relating to slaves, widows and orphans,” he said. …

“The content itself was also unfamiliar to all the cultures in the region besides the Hebrew society,” he continued. “The present inscription provides social elements
similar to those found in the biblical prophecies and very different from prophecies written by other cultures postulating glorification of the gods and taking care of
their physical needs.”

He noted that although the text was similar to several biblical passages (Isaiah 1:17; Psalm 72:3; Exodus 23:3), it does not appear to be a copy of any biblical text.
Nevertheless, this is yet another piece of evidence showing the Bible’s history of Israel is true, and modern revisionists’
histories are false.

Source: Trumpet.com, January 15, 2010