The Shebna Inscription

Welcome back to our series of articles on the History of the Hebrew language. In the previous article, we saw that Hebrew was originally written in the Phoenician script. In this article, we will be looking at an example of Hebrew writing using the Phoenician script.

This is the Shebna inscription. It is written on a stone slab which would have been placed at the entrance of a tomb. The inscription was made sometime during the reign of the kings of Israel.

Notice how the Hebrew text of the inscription is not written in the popularly-known traditional Hebrew script; the letters do not look like the Hebrew letters which many people are familiar with today. Rather, it is written in the Phoenician script.

Because the Phoenician alphabet contains the same letters as the Hebrew alphabet, we could transcribe this inscription in the traditional Hebrew script:

זאת {...}יהו אשר על הבית אינ {...} כספ וזהב
{...} אמ {...} עצמ אמתה אתה ארור האדמ אשר
יפתח את זאת

In English, the inscription reads:

This is {...}iah, who is over the house. There is no silver and gold. Only {...} the bones of his maidservant with him. Cursed is the man who shall open this [tomb].

The inscription is incidentally damaged where the name of the tomb’s owner is written, thus leaving his name mostly lost except for the last three letters: יהו—which is how the personal name of God Jehovah is written when it occurs at the end of proper names. The English equivalent of that would be the “iah” ending which can be found in names like “Isaiah,” “Jeremiah,” “Zechariah,” etc.

The curse was added to deter tomb raiders and looters. Such curses were common among tombs in the land of Canaan. We hope that this warning was heeded, and nobody opened the tomb.