Quote:Point in fact paleo-hebrew is BS. The inscriptions in the region of that age are Phoenician and later Aramaic.
Christopher Rollston disagrees....and as one of the foremost paleographers of our generation I do have to go with him rather than you.
http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily...-language/
Another site notes,
Quote:The name YHWH is not in the modern Syriac squared Hebrew letters, but in the paleo-Hebrew.
http://www.lebtahor.com/Archaeology/insc...scroll.htm
There were people living in Judah during the 7th century BC. They had a language and rudimentary literacy - mainly for record keeping but the Silver Scrolls indicate that they were moving in the direction of actual literature - and they were stomped on by the Babylonians as the destruction layer in "Jerusalem" (or whatever it was called) attests. Nothing we have found suggests that they were "Jews" in any sense of the word we understand. Yahweh may have been their chief god...and a shitty job he did protecting them from the Babylonians...I guess Marduk had a bigger dick than Yahweh. Forgetting the later bible bullshit we have records from the Babylonians themselves telling us what they did.
In fact, my only complaint with Finkelstein is that he abandons his own methodology at the end in order to enshrine Josiah and some sort of Jewish "revival." There is no archaeological attestation for Josiah. He is a figment of the bible writers' imaginations. There can be a political crisis between Judah and Egypt in the 7th century without inventing a whole new fucking religion to be the basis of it. (Judah lost.)
