Khirbet Beit Lei

These inscriptions are hard to decipher, so there are two transcriptions of them into Hebrew.  

a. Naveh

A. יהוה אלהי כל הארץ ה

רי יהד לו לאלהי ירשלם 

YHWH is the God of the whole earth, the mountains

of Judah belong to him, to the God of Jerusalem

B. המוריה אתה חננה נוה יה יהוה

The (Mount of) Moriah you have favored, the dwelling of Yah, YHWH

Cross

A. אני יהוה אליכה ארצה

ערי יהדה וגאלתי ירשלם  

I am YHWH your God

I will accept the cities of Judah

And will redeem Jerusalem

B. נקה יה אל חננ נקה יה יהוה

Absolve (us) O merciful God!

Absolve (us) O YHWH

b. The contribution of these inscriptions for Biblical studies varies depending on which reading you take. For Naveh, the main point of the inscription is the mention of the mountains. These are important because that is the region in which the cave is located and where the people were who wrote it. Naveh dates the inscription to a time when the land was in distress, either under the attack by Sennacherib or by Nebuchadnezzar. Based on paleographic evidence, he dates it to the time of Hezekiah. So the theory he proposes is that there were a family of people (Levites) who used the cave as a burial place, but then came to the cave to escape foreign armies coming throughout the land. If his conclusion is correct, then we can learn some about the attitude of the people during the attack, and we can learn about the central role that Jerusalem played in the mind of the people. The person who wrote the inscription believed that God was still God of the hills, even though the hills were under the political control of a neighboring country. The idea of the second inscription then gives the precedent for a future hope: just as God had saved Jerusalem, so he will save the hills.

            The view of Cross, on the other hand is different. He says that these are not burial inscriptions, in agreement with Naveh. However, he does not deal with the hills of Judah because he does not read this in his view of the transcription. He does say that the first inscription is perhaps a lost prophecy, and the inscriptions were written by someone fleeing from Jerusalem in 587 BC. This gives us a view as to how people were thinking during this attack as well as gives us (perhaps) a prophecy which we have no other record of.

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