The Gezer Calendar
Gezer stood on the inland edge of the coastal plain, a chariot-town that Pharaoh — father-in-law to Solomon — had taken from the Canaanites and given as dowry to his daughter when she married the king of Israel.…
Biblical Narrative
Gezer stood on the inland edge of the coastal plain, a chariot-town that Pharaoh — father-in-law to Solomon — had taken from the Canaanites and given as dowry to his daughter when she married the king of Israel. Solomon rebuilt it, along with Hazor and Megiddo and Beth-horon and Baalath: cities for his store and chariots and horsemen, all that he wanted to build, in Jerusalem, in Lebanon, and in all the land of his dominion. The Lord had given him wisdom and rest on every side; there was neither adversary nor evil occurrent in the days of Solomon.
The land flourished under his reign. The men of Judah and Israel were many, as the sand which is by the sea in multitude, eating and drinking and making merry. Each man dwelt under his vine and under his fig tree. The seasons were known and counted, the harvest seasons most of all: the time of ingathering and the time of sowing, the time when the rains came and the time when the figs grew, the time of pruning and the time of barley and the time of summer fruit. From the smallest village to the king's storehouses, the year turned on the agricultural cycle, and the people learned its rhythm with their hands and their feet.
Some farmer or scribe-in-training, in those days when the schoolboy was beginning to write, took a soft limestone tablet and listed the months in their order. He scratched the verses with simple letters of the kind merchants and farmers were learning to use across the land. He wrote of the two months of ingathering, the two of sowing, the two of late sowing, the month of pulling flax, the month of barley harvest, the month of harvest and feasting, the two months of vine-tending, the month of summer fruit. Then he signed it with his name. The tablet was set aside, lost, broken, and waited beneath the dust of Gezer for nearly three thousand years before it was lifted up again.
Two months of ingathering. Two months of sowing. Two months of late sowing. A month of pulling flax. A month of barley harvest. A month of harvest and feasting. Two months of vine-tending. A month of summer fruit.The Gezer Calendar (paraphrase)
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The Gezer Calendar was discovered in 1908 by Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister, the Irish archaeologist who excavated Gezer for the Palestine Exploration Fund from 1902 to 1909. The artifact is a small limestone tablet (roughly 11 by 7 centimeters), inscribed on both sides with seven lines of paleo-Hebrew letters, listing the agricultural months. Most scholars date it to the late tenth century BCE on paleographic grounds — the letter forms are early, similar to Phoenician of the same period and to the Tel Zayit abecedary published in 2008. It is housed today at the Istanbul Archaeology Museums.
William Foxwell Albright's 1943 epigraphic analysis (BASOR 92) established the consensus reading and the late-tenth-century dating. The script is informal, almost schoolboy in execution — small and irregular letters, rough lines — which led Albright and others to interpret it as either a student's exercise practising the calendar mnemonic, or a tax-collector's working list of agricultural seasons for tribute. The signature at the end, abi or perhaps abiyahu, identifies the writer; this is the earliest signed Hebrew document we possess.
Linguistically, the calendar is debated. Some readers (including most of the original commentators) read the language as Hebrew; others see Phoenician or a transitional Phoenician-Hebrew dialect. The eight verses use the term yarhh (months) twice and the dual ending -aw for paired months, both of which are characteristic Northwest Semitic features that fit either reading. What the calendar undoubtedly shows is that literacy in the late tenth century Levant was already spreading beyond royal scribal schools — that a junior tax-collector or schoolboy could write in the alphabet, however roughly.
The Gezer Calendar is the earliest signed Hebrew text we possess — and the earliest extant document of a literacy spreading from royal scribal schools downward into village administration.Albright, BASOR 92 (1943)