Literate Culture and Tenth-Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context, edited by Ron E.Tappy and P. Kyle McCarterLiterate Culture and Tenth-Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context by Ron E.Tappy; P. Kyle McCarterReview by: Dennis PardeeJournal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 71, No. 1 (April 2012), pp. 167-168Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/664530 .

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Book Reviews F 167

of the Early Bronze Age fortification phase consisted only of the stepped stone structure Wall 7901. There is more, but I will stop here and refer the reader to the forthcoming volume of the final publication series, Dan V. The larger issue here is that if so many details are incorrect for this one site, it stands to reason that the descriptions of other sites’ ramparts may be in equal need of revision. This is not to detract from Burke’s efforts and final result; there is a limit to how much one scholar can do in the pursuit of such a mas-sive synthesis.

Other than the above observations, errors seem to be few. One occurs on page 11, where Burke implies that Megiddo Stratum XII is today widely dated to the Middle Bronze Age IIA. This is not the case; it is generally dated to the early MBIIB, or, at the earliest, to the Middle Bronze Age IIA–IIB transition.6 As usual in the Harvard Semitic Museum Publications/Eisenbrauns series, the editing and proofing is top-notch. The plans and drawings, all reproductions from previously published material, are clear and simple—nothing fancy is required in a scholarly work such as this. I found no misplaced captions or fuzzy plans. Typos are also rare; I found one on the first paragraph of page 21 and on pages 6–7, where Burke promises that he will explain why the term terre pisée should not

6 For example, Y. Aharoni, “Megiddo” in The New Encyclopedia of Excavations in the Holy Land, ed. E. Stern, vol. 3 (Jerusalem, 1993), 1009. For a MBIIA–MBIIB transitional date, see, for exam-ple, E. Arie, “Urban Land Use Changes on the Southeastern Slope of Tel Megiddo during the Middle Bronze Age,” in Bene Israel: Studies in the Archaeology of Israel and the Levant during the Bronze and Iron Ages in Honour of Israel Finkelstein, ed. A. Fantalkin and A. Yasur-Landau (Leiden, 2008), 5.

be used for earthen ramparts on page 50, when this explanation actually occurs on page 51.

While one may quibble about details, Burke’s syn-thesis introduces a depth and order to the subject that was absent before. We get a sense of where these fortification systems may have begun, why they began, and how they developed. We are presented with a sys-tematic typology of fortification and a comprehensive roster of fortified sites. This work will be useful for years to come, so much so that I fear that students will lack motivation to do much further research on the topic, despite Burke’s suggestions to the contrary (p. 162).

Burke remarks that his own research has demon-strated that Benjamin Mazar was correct in writing, in 1968, that the emergence of ramparted tells can be linked to the reign of Shamshi-Adad in Assyria. Simi-larly, he notes that Moshe Dothan, writing in 1973, at-tributed late Middle Bronze Age rampart construction to the threat from a resurgent seventeenth-dynasty Egypt.7 These may or may not be the explanations for the emergence of ramparts, but they emanate from a certain mid-range historical perspective whereby much of what has happened in the Levant was a reac-tion to influences (or threats, in this case) from the powers to the north and the south. Given the current state of affairs in the Middle East, the question is: Do such perceptions reflect the unchanging reality in the spiraling matrix of history or are they self-fulfilling prophecies?

7 B. Mazar, “The Middle Bronze Age in Palestine,” Israel Explo-ration Journal 18 (1968): 65–97; M. Dothan, “The Foundation of Tel Mor and Ashdod,” Israel Exploration Journal 23 (1973): 1–17.

Literate Culture and Tenth-Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context. Edited by Ron E. Tappy and P. Kyle McCarter. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008. Pp. xii + 140 + 26 figs. + DVD. $37.50 (cloth).reviewed by dennis pardee, University of Chicago.

The dearth of Hebrew inscriptions datable to the early Iron Age imbues with great importance the few that do exist. Thus the discovery in a tenth-century level at Tel Zayit, on the border between Judah and Philistia, of a complete abecedary carved on a stone too large to have easily been hauled in from elsewhere caused a major stir in the worlds of Northwest-Semitic epigra-phy and Israelite archaeology/history. This collection

represents the first organized discussion of the find, the fruits of a panel held at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in late 2007.

The excavator of Tel Zayit and one of the organiz-ers of the panel, Ron E. Tappy, describes the geopo-litical position of Tel Zayit (perhaps biblical Libnah) and argues that the abecedary “played a significant role” in the “symbolism” of a Judaean town on the

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168 F Journal of Near Eastern Studies

border with Philistia (“Tel Zayit and the Tel Zayit Abecedary in Their Regional Context,” 1–44). The co-organizer of the panel, P. Kyle McCarter, claims that the script of the abecedary shows incipient Ju-daean palaeographic features (“Paleographic Notes on the Tel Zayit Abecedary,” 45–59), while Chris-topher A. Rollston argues, quite convincingly in my opinion, that it does not (“The Phoenician Script of the Tel Zayit Abecedary and Putative Evidence for Israelite Literacy,” 61–96).1 Seth Sanders presents his view that writing does not supply evidence for state formation until clearly state-generated documents are produced (“Writing and Early Iron Age Israel: Be-fore National Scripts, Beyond Nations and States,” 97–112)—he does not explain, however, why Ugarit, an undeniable royal “state” with no hints of vestigial pre-royal (tribal) ideology and under clear Mesopo-tamian influence in its writing traditions, produced no state propaganda such as the earlier inscription of Hammurabi or the later one of Mesha. Are we really to believe that the 1,000+ Ugaritic economic/admin-istrative texts, which exist alongside several hundred Akkadian economic, epistolary, and legal texts, are the work of “highly skilled craftsmen” (p. 105, with refer-

1 Not to be disguised is the ax that I have to grind here: I have expressed dubiety about the Gezer Calendar showing incipient Judaean sign-forms, as P. K. McCarter would have it (“A Brief Case for the Language of the ‘Gezer Calendar’ as Phoenician’” to appear in Linguistic Studies in Phoenician Grammar).

ence to the early Phoenician texts) who would have been trained outside the royal administration and who would subsequently have worked outside that system while recording its activities?2 Finally, in a presentation billed as “maximalist” but which is, in fact, quite finely balanced, David M. Carr proposes that the Tell Zayit abecedary, along with other data, provides evidence for “an emergent state structure,” which made use of a borrowed Phoenician alphabet “in some administra-tive centers” (“The Tel Zayit Abecedary in (Social) Context,” 113–29, quotations from p. 124). Just to illustrate how precarious is this conclusion drawn from the poor data set presently available, he presents an alternative minimalist position according to which the abecedary might only reflect “the fairly isolated pres-ence of a scribe educated in the Phoenician system” (p. 125).

The editors are to be congratulated for seeking a relatively broad range of views (well within a broadly defined center, of course!) rather than inviting a flock of parrots.

2 I state the question in extreme terms and with a degree of incredulity while recognizing that the distribution of economic and epistolary documents across the mound of Ras Shamra (some dis-covered in the royal palace, some in apparently private dwellings) may eventually be explained by some variant of Sanders’ hypothesis. So my skepticism should be seen as a plea for a plausible reconstruc-tion of the Ugaritic socio-economic system and the place of writing in it along lines that might fit into his view of the place of writing in ancient polities.

Biblical Hebrew in Its Northwest Semitic Setting: Typological and Historical Perspectives. Edited by Steven E. Fassberg and Avi Hurvitz. Publication of the Institute for Advanced Studies 1. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press/Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006. Pp. 324. $45.reviewed by dennis pardee, University of Chicago.

Twenty essays are gathered here that represent vari-ous degrees of participation in the deliberations of “an international research group on the subject . . . convened at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem during the 2001–2002 academic year” (p. 9). The introduction men-tions scholars who participated throughout the year and others who lectured as guests; there is no way of gauging the degrees of participation of authors of articles published here by persons not named in the introduction. The authors and titles are: M. Bar-Asher, “The Qal Passive Participle of Geminate Verbs in Biblical Hebrew” (pp. 11–25); J. Blau, “Problems of Noun Inflection in Arabic: Reflections on the Diptote

Declension” (pp. 27–31); J. A. Emerton, “The King-doms of Judah and Israel and Ancient Hebrew History Writing” (pp. 33–49); S. E. Fassberg, “Sequences of Positive Commands in Biblical Hebrew: לך לך אמר, ואמרת הלוך W. R. Garr, “The ;(pp. 51–64) ”ואמרת, Paragogic nun in Rhetorical Perspective” (pp. 65–74); E. L. Greenstein, “Forms and Functions of the Fi-nite Verb in Ugaritic Narrative Verse” (pp. 75–102); J. Huehnergard, “On the Etymology of the Hebrew Relative še-” (pp. 103–25); A. Hurvitz, “Continuity and Change in Biblical Hebrew: The Linguistic His-tory of a Formulaic Idiom from the Realm of the Royal Court” (pp. 127–33); J. Joosten, “The Disappearance of Iterative WEQATAL in the Biblical Hebrew Verbal

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