Tanach Thoughts

Sometimes I'll start a post, and for several days/weeks/months will not be able to finish it. By the time I do get around to it, new info will have come to my attention and a re-write will be needed (sometimes that's the cause of the laziness of not finishing the post). That's the case with this post. Original beginning: Spoiler warning: There will not be a satisfying chiddush at the end of this post. Just some head-scratchers, at best. New beginning:  Please partially disregard the previous beginning. Yeshurun! So majestic, so inspiring, so...actually, this one isn't so bizarrely-named . Yeshurun is one of the names of the People of Yisrael. Surprisingly, this is one of the few points that just about every commentator, both Jewish and otherwise, agree on. Take that, whoever invented "two Jews, three opinions"! *ahem* Anyway, "Yeshurun" appears a total of four times in Tanach: "So Jeshurun grew fat and kicked—You grew fat and gross and coarse. ...

 As you can see, I'm making up for the last month or so of no posts. I heard today a class by Dr. Chagai Misgav, a religious doctor of archeology in the Hebrew University. One of the things he said was that a few years before the class was given (the class is from the year 5773, so we're talking about around 5768), an ostracon - i.e. a piece of ancient pottery with writing on it - was discovered in the Beit Ha'elah Valley. This discovery was considered very dramatic in the world of archeology. Why? Well, until that point, it had been widely accepted that the proto-Hebraic alphabet had evolved from the proto-Canaanite alphabet. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, let me explain: This is what the proto-Canaanite looks like: (image taken from here ) and this is what proto-Hebrew looks like: (image taken from here ) When comparing the various inscriptions and ostracons found, the archeological world managed to create the following theory of development: (image taken...