Reply #15: It means a lot less than they're making it out to mean

[starroute]

The article says that this discovery shows Hebrew was being written earlier than was previously documented. But we already knew that the Phoenician alphabet goes back to perhaps 1100 BC, and that by 800 BC it had spread as far as Greece (where it was used to write down the Iliad and the Odyssey). So it was predictable that it would have been in use for writing Hebrew by the 900's.

It says the use of Biblical-like phrases proves that the Bible itself was written centuries earlier than previously thought -- but it does no such thing. Students of Homeric Greek have shown on linguistic grounds that many of the poetic formulas used by Homer must go back to as early as 1400 BC, but there is no indication that the Iliad or Odyssey as artistic works were composed any earlier than the period when they were written down.

And it says the reference to "the king" shows there was already a kingdom of Israel -- but it certainly doesn't prove that the legendary kingdom of David and Solomon actually existed. At most it means that there were kings of some sort -- perhaps petty rulers who used the legends of a vast empire of Israel at some unspecified past era in an attempt to put themselves on a more equal footing with the rulers of Egypt and Assyria.

The archaeology of Israel is fascinating -- but unfortunately the politics of Israel mean you have to take much of it with a grain of salt.