Tell es-Safi Ostracon

Seven Letters on a Bowl

The sherd was found in the 2005 season of the Tell es-Safi/Gath Archaeological Project, directed by A. Maeir of Bar-Ilan University. The site is Tel Zafit in the Judean Shephelah, identified with Philistine Gath. No individual finder is recorded — the project runs on students and volunteers, and the person who lifted this piece out of a bucket is not named in the publication.

It is a body sherd from a ceramic bowl, and unlike the ink letters elsewhere in this section the writing here is scratched into the surface with something needle-like. Seven letters in Old Canaanite — the early alphabetic script — make two words: ALWT and WLT. Maeir dates it to the tenth to early ninth century BC on two independent grounds, the stratigraphy of the layer it came from and the typology of the bowl itself, and it lies below the destruction of Gath attributed to Hazael of Aram. It was published in 2008 by A. Maeir, S. Wimmer, A. Zukerman and A. Demsky in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research.

What Two Names Are Worth

The genuine significance of this sherd has nothing to do with any individual. Both names are non-Semitic, of Indo-European type — the sort of names a population with Aegean or Anatolian roots would carry. They are written in the local Canaanite alphabet. That combination is the whole point: at Gath, in the tenth or ninth century BC, Philistines were keeping their own names and using their neighbours' writing system. It is a snapshot of a people in the middle of assimilating, taken from the century the Bible places David and the Philistine wars in.

It is also, as Maeir has stressed, one of the earliest early-alphabetic inscriptions that is both securely dated and from a clear archaeological context rather than the antiquities market — which, after the article on the Baruch bullae in this section, is a distinction a reader will recognise the value of. For the Bible's purposes it fills in background: Gath was a real Philistine city with a literate administration, and the men in it had names that did not sound Hebrew.

It Does Not Say Goliath, and the Excavator Went Further Than That

In 2005 and 2006 this sherd was reported around the world as the "Goliath inscription." It is not. The Hebrew name Goliath is spelled glyt; neither word on the sherd is that name, or anything close to it as a spelling. The connection that was originally proposed was purely etymological: that ALWT might belong to the same family as the Lydian royal name Alyattes, which scholars going back to the 1920s had suggested as a background for the name Goliath.

That was the claim in 2006, and Maeir's own corrections at the time were already firmer than the coverage. The important development came later. In 2010, answering a proposed alternative reading, he wrote that his team had looked into the etymology themselves and found it did not hold — in his words, "the onomastic similarity of alwt/alyattes/goliath was dropped." He has also stated plainly that they never claimed the sherd belonged to Goliath. He refers to it in his own writing as the so-called Goliath inscription, with the quotation marks doing exactly the work quotation marks do.

So the position is stronger than "the link is only etymological." The excavator who found the object, and who first floated the etymology, has since withdrawn it. Any article that tells a reader these names are linguistically related to Goliath is repeating a claim the man best placed to test it has publicly abandoned. This app does not repeat it, and the entry in this project's own scoping document that described the link as etymological has been corrected accordingly.

There is a separate live disagreement about the reading itself, and it is a normal one. G. Hamilton proposed an additional letter, a gimel raised above the line, giving algwt — which would make the name Semitic rather than Indo-European. Maeir's published response is that the mark is not a letter but the trace left on the sherd by a plant root, a common enough thing that volunteers bring him supposed inscriptions of the same kind during pottery washing. F. M. Cross and L. E. Stager also disputed the reading and the dating in an excursus published before the inscription itself had appeared in print, and Maeir objected sharply to being criticised in advance of publication.

What is left when the headline is removed is still worth a reader's time. A Philistine at Gath, in roughly the century of David, wrote two Philistine names using Canaanite letters on a broken bowl. The Bible's picture of Philistine cities as organised, literate neighbours with foreign names is exactly what that sherd shows — which is a smaller claim than the one the newspapers ran, and unlike that one, it is true.

Scripture references

• 1 Samuel 17:4 — Goliath of Gath, the champion whose name the sherd was said to carry
• Joshua 11:22 — Gath as one of the cities where the Anakim remained
• 1 Samuel 5:8 — The ark carried to Gath — the city as a real administrative centre
• 2 Samuel 21:19 — Goliath the Gittite again, in a passage with its own textual puzzle

Sources

• ScholarshipA. Maeir, S. Wimmer, A. Zukerman and A. Demsky, "A Late Iron Age I/Early Iron Age II Old Canaanite Inscription from Tell es-Safi/Gath, Israel" — Aren Maeir, Stefan Wimmer, Alexander Zukerman and Aaron Demsky · Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 351 (August 2008), 39-71; DOI 10.1086/basor25609285. The publisher's site returns a challenge page rather than the article to automated requests, so no link is given · paywalledSupports: The editio princeps: the reading, the palaeography, the dating and the historical interpretation
• Holding institutionA. Maeir, "Comment on Hamilton's reading of the Safi sherd" — Aren M. Maeir, director of the Tell es-Safi/Gath Archaeological Project — the excavating body's own statement · 16 March 2010Supports: The withdrawal of the Goliath etymology, the statement that no claim was ever made about Goliath himself, and the plant-root answer to Hamilton's proposed gimel
• Holding institutionA. Maeir, "Comment on the news item in BAR on the 'Goliath Inscription'" — Aren M. Maeir, Tell es-Safi/Gath Archaeological Project · 16 February 2006 — the excavator's numbered corrections to the magazine report that created the popular framingSupports: The stratigraphic and typological dating, and the original form of the etymological suggestion before it was dropped
• Holding institutionA. Maeir, "re: nasty comments in IEJ from Cross and Stager" — Aren M. Maeir, Tell es-Safi/Gath Archaeological Project · 9 January 2007. Records the Cross and Stager excursus and Maeir's objection to being answered before publicationSupports: The existence and character of the Cross and Stager dispute over the reading and dating

Further reading

• A. Maeir: comment on Hamilton's reading of the Safi sherd
• A. Maeir: comment on the news item in BAR on the "Goliath Inscription"

Reflect

The true story here is smaller than the headline and better attested. When have you preferred the bigger version of a story to the one you could actually stand behind?