Biblical Archaeology Review

For an overview of the development of the Hebrew scripts, see Joseph Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet: An Introduction to West Semintic Epigraphy and Paleography Jerusalem: Magness Press, 1982) and Mark McLean, “The Use and Development of Palaeo-Hebrew in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods” (dissertation, Harvard Univ., 1982). Naveh’s plate 14D shows a fragment of the Psalms Scroll written in square Hebrew, but with YHWH in paleo-Hebrew.

The finest of these is 11Q paleo Lev. See David Noel Freedman and K.A. Mathews, The Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus Scroll (11Q paleo Lev) (ASOR, 1985).

Gordon published the definitive version of his paper as “The Bat Creek Inscription,” in The Book of the Descendants of Doctor Benjamin Lee and Dorothy Gordon, ed. Cyrus H. Gordon (Ventnor, NJ: Ventnor, 1972), pp. 5–18. A less technical version appeared as an appendix to his Before Columbus: Links Between the Old World and Ancient America (New York: Crown, 1971).

Henriette Mertz, The Wine Dark Sea (Chicago: privately published, 1964), p. 130; Joseph Corey Ayoob (unpublished): W.W. Strong (unpublished); Joseph B. Mahan, “The Bat Creek Stone,” Tennessee Archaeologist 27 (1971), pp. 38–44; and belatedly, but independently, the present author.

For a character-by-character comparison, see McCulloch, “The Bat Creek Inscription,” pp. 83–88.

Thomas, “Mound Explorations,” p. 393.

J. Huston McCulloch, “The Bat Creek Inscription—Cherokee or Hebrew?” Tennessee Anthropologist (TA) 13 (1988), p. 96.

According to a tag accompanying the stone in the Smithsonian Anthropology Department’s Processing Laboratory.

Thomas, “Mound Explorations,” p. 393.