GonzoGOP wrote:
“The oldest known Hebrew text was found in November of 2008. it is a 3,000-year-old pottery shard with five lines of text was found during excavations of the Elah Fortress, the oldest known biblical-period fortress, which dates to the tenth century BC. It was written in Proto-Canaanite script.”
This statement is a bit misleading. Now, note that I am not saying that you are trying to mislead, simply that the statement is misleading. Hebrew as a language is a member of the Northwest Semitic language family. It is essentially Canaanite, as is also, for example, Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Moabite. It was almost certainly the language, with possibly dialectical variations, of at least some of the inhabitants of what we know as Canaan when Abram first entered Canaan. He and his descendants would have learned it from the population of Canaan rather than having brought it with them from their native Mesopotamia, whether upper (northern) or lower (southern). Canaanite could be rendered into written form by means of more than one writing system, and was!
We know Hebrew in its alphabetic, or more properly, abjadic form, i.e. with symbols or characters that represent individual and discreet sounds/vocalics, all of which were, originally, consonantal. To us these symbols look like “letters,” which in a sense, they are. The people at Ugarit, however, though they spoke essentially the same language, used a set of 30 characters that were formed by the impression of a reed stylus into soft clay. They look to the unwary just like what we know as “cuneiform” writing. But they are not. They too are alphabetic/abjadic, like what we know as Hebrew, but written differently both with and on a different medium. But Canaanite can also be written used the true cuneiform system (of about 600 symbols), which is syllabic/ideographic. The best examples of this are to found among the 300 plus so-called Amarna Tablets, dating from the 14th century B.C., and found in Egypt at the site of ancient Ahketaten (Tell el-Amarna), although a few exemplars (mostly fragments) have been found in Palestine/Canaan.
Without a doubt, Canaanite was a language in use well before the time of Moses and, probably, well before the time of Abraham. Just because we do not have examples of Canaanite written with what we think of as “Hebrew letters” much before the 10th century B.C. by no means can be used to assert that Canaanite, or even Hebrew, was not known, spoken, and written well before that. Trying to prove otherwise by means of the negative, i.e., of absence, is a fool’s errand, and quite illogical.
Thank you for your most informative post. I had studied much of that long ago but unfortunately the knowledge has long since “flown the coop.” In any event, the salient point is that there is no reason to dogmatically insist that the Israelites could not have possessed a form of writing prior to C10 BC. There is, as you suggest, every reason to believe that they had written language from their earliest history.