Dedicated to a furnace
by William H. Shea
AUDIO IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR THIS ARTICLE
Hidden away in the high granite mountains just to the north of the traditional site of Mount Sinai are a number of short inscriptions written in one of the earliest forms of the alphabet. Most of the samples of this kind of writing, known as Proto-Sinaitic script, cluster around a particular area in which Semitic workers mined turquoise for the Egyptians.
First discovered by E. H. Palmer in the winter of 1868-1869, nothing much was done with them until Sir Flinders Petrie explored the same region in 1905. A decade later Sir Alan Gardiner made the breakthrough that allowed translation of these inscriptions. Now scholars have outlined the entire alphabet used in them (see Figure 1). Through many intermediate stages, our modern alphabet has descended from these early alphabetic letter forms.
Most of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions cluster around the turquoise mines—some of them carved right in the walls of the mine shafts or caves. However, one inscription stands off by itself. That probably explains why it was not found until much later. In 1960 Georg Gerster, a German scholar, was exploring an area of Sinai then known as the Wadi Nasb. An old Egyptian inscription had been discovered carved on the rock face of the saddle between that valley and the next valley to the east. As Professor Gerster probed that area, he noticed that not more than a meter to the left of the Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription there was another text, this one in scribed in the Proto-Sinaitic script.
Professor Gerster turned his photo graphs and copy of this inscription over to W. F. Albright, and Albright passed them on to J. Liebovitch, who produced the first published study of it. Later Al bright also published a study of the text, and since then another half-dozen or so scholarly articles on it have appeared, two of them involving firsthand reexaminations of the inscription. Scholars disagree as to how this text should be read. But, in general, they agree on the identification of 11 of the 15 letters that comprise it.
Puzzling out the inscription
As the photograph of the inscription (page 6) reveals, the scribe incised these letters in vertical columns. And the information these columns convey makes the most sense when one reads them from left to right—the direction in which I have numbered them for the purpose of this study.
The letters most in dispute are those at the bottom of the first three of the columns, in part because the rock there was rougher than that above it when the inscription was made, and in part because these letters have suffered damage since then. The case for a new identification of two of these letters can be made quite simply. Like the second letter down in the third column, the letter at the bottom of the first column looks like a fish standing on its tail. While the latter is not as good an example as the former, it is clear enough to identify as a fish. The common West Semitic word for fish was dag, and so, because this sign represents the first sound in that word, it stands for the letter d or dalet.
We can also identify quite directly the letter at the bottom of the second column. The letter above it is a square that represents a house. The West Semitic word for house was beth, a word beginning with the b sound, and so this sign was used for that letter. The letter directly below this beth also has a square shape. It was not as nicely inscribed, yet it is square enough that we can identify it as a beth without great difficulty. Among the identifications of the disputed letters this one has the most significance—the others are not nearly so important.
The letter at the bottom of the third column looks like an open hand at the end of a forearm. This probably is an example—rare in these inscriptions—of the letter y. The word for hand, yad, provided the y to this alphabet through a picture of the hand.
The other disputed letter is at the top of the fourth column. Regarding it I can only state what I see there. It seems to me that this letter resembles the head (for rosh or r) at the bottom of this same column. I have drawn this form out in my hand copy of the text (Figure 2). This letter is not particularly vital to the interpretation of the text that I am proposing.
Now if we take the 11 letters upon which scholars agree and add the identifications I have proposed for the four disputed letters, the text reads as follows:
Column I Column II Column III Column IV
W T 'A R
L W D K
cA H Y R
D B
B
Later alphabetic inscriptions frequently made use of word dividers, but this text does not contain this line or stroke, so we must make our own divisions based upon the best sense units that we can derive from the flow of the text. To aid our reading of the inscription, we may also rotate the lines so that they read horizontally. When we do this, the inscription reads:
Column I W/L/ CAD
Column II T/W/HBB
Column III 'ADY
Column IV R/KR
Since the inscription is short, we can put it all on one line, joining together the words the inscriber divided as he moved from the bottom of one column to the top of the next. The inscription then reads: W-L-CADT W-HBB 'ADYR KR.
In Semitic languages, the letter W commonly serves as a conjunction, and it appears to play this role twice in this text.
In biblical Hebrew it can also introduce a statement, as it does here in the first case.
The letter L is the common preposition "to, for" in Semitic languages, and that meaning fits well its usage in the first line.
The Old Testament and especially the books of Moses commonly use the word cadat and its by-form c edah (the c above the line represents the letter c ayin) for the "congregation" of Israel.
Written with a strong h sound, as it is in this inscription, the word HBB corresponds directly to the consonants used in the name of Hobab, Moses' brother-in-law (Num. 10:29 and Judges4:ll).
The word 'adir means "mighty, splendid, glorious" in biblical Hebrew, and in the same language the word KR, vocalized kur, refers to a furnace used for smelting metals (Deut. 4:20; 1 Kings 8:51; Jer. 11:4; Prov. 17:3; 27:21; Isa. 48:10; and Eze. 22:18-22).
Translated, this simple statement says, "Now for the congregation and Hobab, mighty is the furnace."
Fitting in the slag
Just what is the inscription all about? The text itself indicates that it commemorates something. What does it commemorate? Whatever it was, it must have had something to do with the smelter that this brief text mentions, for—according to the adjective used with it—that smelter appears to have done an especially good job for someone.
Here a little field archaeology will help us. This inscription was found on the eastern slope of the Wadi Nasb. Down in the wadi itself there is an unusual archaeological finding—a pile of slag! This pile of slag from the smelting of copper is not just an insignificant little heap, it is massive. Of it Petrie wrote in 1906, "In the Wadi Nasb is an enormous mass of slag from copper smelting, about six or eight feet high, and extending apparently over about 500 feet along the valley, and 300 feet wide, but Bauerman [a German geologist who described it before Petrie saw it] puts it at 250 yards by 200 yards.... Besides this mass of slag, which may amount to about 100,000 tons, I saw much scattered slag all the way up to the tablet."
The tablet Petrie referred to is the Egyptian inscription located next to the Proto-Sinaitic inscription we have been discussing (but which Petrie did not notice at the time). These two pieces of this archaeological-linguistic puzzle fit together nicely: the wadi holds a pile of slag from smelting activities involving a furnace, and the mountainside above it contains an inscription mentioning a furnace.
Who was commemorating these activities with this inscription? For the answer, we must look back at the first part of the inscription. It contains two words of reference, one referring to a collective group and one to an individual.
The inscription terms the collective group the "congregation." The use here of the word that was commonly used in biblical Hebrew to refer to the congregation of Israel strongly suggests that Israel was this "congregation"—but we cannot directly make this connection because the inscription does not use the word "Israel." However, another piece of evidence strengthens this interpretation. Along with the congregation, the inscription mentions an individual who carried on this kind of activity—Hobab.
According to Numbers 10:29, Hobab was the son of Reuel, who was also Moses' father-in-law. (Apparently Reuel was another name for Jethro—see Ex. 2:16, 18, 21; 3:1.) That makes Moses and Hobab brothers-in-law. Note where Jethro/ Reuel and Hobab appear in the Sinai narratives. Jethro appears at the beginning of them, when Israel arrives in Sinai (Ex. 18:Iff). After staying there a short time and helping Moses organize the camp, he returns to his homeland. Hobab, on the other hand, is still in Sinai with the Israelites a year later when they are getting ready to leave for the promised land. As a matter of fact, Moses asked Hobab to act as their guide on that journey because he knew the territory so well.
So the evidence suggests that Hobab remained with the Israelites during their year-long sojourn in Sinai. If he remained with them during that period, he probably worked with them. What kind of work would he have been involved in? Judges 4:11 notes that Hobab was a Kenite by his tribal affiliation, and the Kenites were known as metalsmiths — indeed, their tribal name indicates that they were smiths. This biblical text, then, forges a meaningful link between the inscription in Sinai and the slag heap nearby. The processing of copper is the very type of activity a Kenite like Hobab would have carried on.
Meeting the demand for bronze
But the slag heap was so large. How would Israel have used all of the copper the slag heap indicates they produced? Once again the biblical records for the wilderness period help answer our question. The Israelites did not spend their year in Sinai in idleness. They worked. More specifically, they concentrated their efforts on one particular building project—the construction of the sanctuary. Descriptions of this project take up almost all of the last 15 chapters of the book of Exodus. First come the instructions on how to construct the sanctuary and then follows the description of their building it.
The Old Testament refers to bronze 130 times, and 35 of these references occur in these last chapters of Exodus. The major role bronze played in the construction of the tabernacle explains this concentration of references to it in this part of Exodus. One estimate suggests that it took two and a half tons of bronze to meet the needs of the tabernacle. *
Three pieces of evidence have come together here: (1) references in the biblical text to the "congregation" (of Israel), to Hobab, and to the process of smelting; (2) the inscription in Sinai that appears to mention these very same things; and (3) the slag heap from the smelter nearby in the Wadi Nasb. Apparently, then, we have here the remarkable find of an inscription from the very time of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt that corresponds with the biblical description of their activities in Sinai during that time.
This text mentions by name a person whom the Bible identifies by time and place only. Prior to this time all of the extra-biblical references to individual Israelites have come from the first millennium B.C. or later. This text pushes the horizons of that kind of information back to the middle of the second millennium B.C., the time to which the ProtoSinaitic inscriptions are dated by their Egyptian associations.
For a fuller description of the linguistic
and archaeological details involved in this
study, see the author's "New Light on the
Exodus and on Construction of the Tabernacle:
Gerster's ProtO'Sinaitic Inscription
No. 1," in Andrews University Seminary
Studies, 25 (Spring 1987): 73-96.
*The amount of refined copper represented by the
slag heap present in the Wadi Nasb clearly exceeds
the two and a half tons of bronze NahumSarna (in
his commentary on Exodus) estimated went into
the construction of the tabernacle. Any one of
several explanations may account for this. The
Israelites may have smelted metal for use in weapons
and household objects. Others besides the Israelites
may have used the site before and/or after they
did—a likely scenario if the Kenite metalsmiths
represented by Hobab cooperated with the Israel
ites in the production of bronze for the tabernacle
and possibly other uses.
Regardless of who used the site, the source of the
copper remains a mystery. The mines in the
immediate area are turquoise mines. In ancient times,
copper was mined in the Wadi Arabah to the
northeast and in the southern Negev. Modern
Egyptians mine manganese in the vicinity of Abu
Zenima on the western coast of Sinai. In general,
though we don't know the precise location from
which the ore came that was used at the smelter,
the area is rich in mineral deposits. I suspect that
the ore smelted in Wadi Nasb came from a coppermine
closer to that wadi than any that have been
located up to this time. The existence of the slag
heap would seem to justify further surface explorations
in the area.