An archeologist digging at a hilltop southwest of Jerusalem believes a ceramic shard found in the ruins of an ancient town bears the oldest Hebrew inscription ever discovered.
The five lines of faded characters written 3,000 years ago, and the ruins of the fortified settlement where they were found, are indications that a powerful Jewish kingdom existed at the time of King David, says Yossi Garfinkel, the Hebrew University archeologist in charge of the new dig at Hirbet Keiyafa.
Other scholars are hesitant to embrace Garfinkel's interpretation of the finds, made public on Thursday.
The discoveries are already being wielded in a vigorous and ongoing argument over whether the Bible's account of events is meant to be taken literally.
Hirbet Keiyafa sits near Beit Shemesh in an area that was once the frontier between the Israelites and their enemies, the Philistines.
The site overlooks the Elah Valley, said to be the scene of the slingshot showdown between David and Goliath, and lies near the ruins of Goliath's hometown in the Philistine metropolis of Gat.
A teenage volunteer found the curved pottery shard, 15 centimeters by 15 centimeters, in July near the stairs and stone washtub of an excavated home. It was later discovered to bear five lines of characters known as proto-Canaanite, a precursor of the Hebrew alphabet.
Carbon-14 analysis of burnt olive pits found in the same layer of the site dated them to between 1,000 and 975 BCE, the same time as King David's rule in Jerusalem.
Scholars have identified other, smaller Hebrew fragments from the 10th century BCE but the script, which Garfinkel suggests might be part of a letter, predates the next significant Hebrew inscription by between 100 and 200 years.
The best-known ancient Hebrew texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, were penned on parchment beginning 850 years later.
The shard is now kept in a university safe while philologists translate it, a task expected to take months. But several words have already been tentatively identified, including ones meaning "judge," "slave" and "king."
The Israelites were not the only ones using proto-Canaanite characters, and other scholars suggest it is difficult - perhaps impossible - to conclude the text is Hebrew and not a related language spoken in the area at the time.
Garfinkel bases his identification on a three-letter verb from the inscription meaning "to do," a word he said existed only in Hebrew.
"That leads us to believe that this is Hebrew, and that this is the oldest Hebrew inscription that has been found," he said.
Other prominent biblical archeologists warned against jumping to conclusions.
Hebrew University archeologist Amihai Mazar said the inscription was "very important," as it is the longest proto-Canaanite text ever found. But he suggested that calling the text Hebrew might be going too far.
"It's proto-Canaanite," he said. "The differentiation between the scripts, and between the languages themselves in that period, remains unclear."
If Garfinkel's claim is borne out, it would bolster the case for the Old Testament's accuracy by indicating the Israelites could record events as they happened.
It also would mean that the settlement - a fortified town with a 10-meter-wide monumental gate, a central fortress and a wall running 700 meters in circumference - was probably inhabited by Israelites.
The finds have not yet established who the residents were, says Aren Maier, a Bar-Ilan University archeologist who is digging at nearby Gat. It will become more clear if, for example, evidence of the local diet is found, he said: Excavations have shown that Philistines ate dogs and pigs, while Jews did not.
The nature of the ceramic shards found at the site suggest residents might have been neither Israelites nor Philistines but members of a third, unknown people, he said.
If the inscription is Hebrew, it would make the text "one of the most important texts, without a doubt, in the corpus of Hebrew inscriptions," Maier said.
But it has great importance whatever the language turns out to be, he added.
Saar Ganor, an Israel Antiquities Authority ranger, noticed the unusual scale of the walls while patrolling the area in 2003. Three years later he interested Garfinkel, and after a preliminary dig they began work in earnest this summer. They have excavated only 4 percent of the 24-dunam settlement so far.
Garfinkel believes building fortifications like those at Hirbet Keiyafa could not have been a local initiative: The walls would have required moving 200,000 tons of stone, a task too big for the 500 or so people who lived there. Instead, it would have required an organized kingdom like the one the Bible says David ruled.
Many Jews see archeology as a way of strengthening the Jewish claim to Israel. So finding evidence of his rule has importance beyond its interest to scholars.
The dig is partially funded by Foundation Stone, a Jewish educational organization, which hopes to bring volunteers to work there as a way of teaching them a national and historical lesson.
"When I stand here, I understand that I'm on the front lines of the battle between the Israelites and the Philistines," said Rabbi Barnea Levi Selavan, the group's director. "I open my Bible and read about David and Goliath, and I understand that I'm in the biblical context."
While the site could be useful to scholars, archeologist Yisrael Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University urged adhering to the strict boundaries of science.
Finkelstein, who has not visited the dig but attended a presentation of the findings, warned against what he said was a "revival in the belief that what's written in the Bible is accurate like a newspaper."
That style of archeology was favored by 19th century European diggers who trolled the Holy Land for physical traces of biblical stories, their motivation and methods more romantic than scientific.
"This can be seen as part of this phenomenon," Finkelstein said.
