Hirbet Qeiyafa, Israel: An Israeli archaeologist has discovered a Hebrew inscription on a 3,000-year-old pottery shard — a find that suggests Biblical accounts of the ancient Israelite kingdom of David could have been based on written texts.
The text could well be the oldest known example of Hebrew writing and suggests that the ancient Israelites were literate and that the Biblical accounts could have been based on written records and not just oral traditions.
This adds greater credibility to arguments that the Biblical historical accounts were actually based upon written records and not just oral traditions that may be little more than myth.
A carbon dating analysis of the shard pegs the pottery and the writing to between 1,000 and 975 B.C.–around the same time of King David’s reign in Jerusalem.
Scholars in the last 50 years or so have questioned whether there was any kind of literacy in Israel at the time and have speculated that the Bible records were based solely upon oral tradition. Also, some have even questioned whether King David was an actual person or just a myth.
The discovery of this shard could go a long ways towards supporting the Bible and towards dispelling some of the recent theories against the accuracy of Biblical accounts.