If you travel 32 Km west northwest of Jerusalem, you will arrive today to a place called Gezer, that in literal translation in modern Hebrew means a carrot. But this “carrot” has at least 3000 years of heritage, from the days it was defeated by Joshua (Josh 10:33; 12:12), and allotted to the tribe of Ephraim (Josh 16:3) as well as to the Levites (Josh 21:21).

During excavations in the biblical city of Gezer (Tell el-Jazari), between 1902 -1907, discovered R.A. Macalister a tablet of soft limestone in a Paleo-Hebrew script. He called the tablet the Gezer Calendar. The tablet is dating to the 10^th century BCE and it’s one of the oldest known examples of Hebrew writing (It’s need to be said that some scholars thing that the tablet is in a Phoenician script).

Imagine this: the days are the unified kingdom days; King Solomon is the ruler that is building the first temple, and also the city of Gezer (see 1 kings 9:15 – Perhaps that’s an archeological evidence of the existence of the unified kingdom – but this is not our topic today). what’s written in the Gezer Calendar that is so important to us?

The calendar describes monthly or bi-monthly periods and attributes to each a duty such as harvest, planting, or tending specific crops. It reads:

 * For a different translation click here: http://holylandphotos.org/browse.asp?s=1,3,7,202,203,336,337&img=TWMRISAM04

Scholars have speculated that the calendar is either a schoolboy’s memory exercise or the text of a popular folk song, or child’s song. Another possibility is something designed for the collection of taxes from farmers (an official document, which presents in proper chronological sequence the main farming seasons in the district of the lowlands of Palestine). If you want to visit the Gezer Calendar and give another interpretation, you should travel to Istanbul to the Museum of the Ancient Orient, and offer a one. For me it seems that Abijah has done his homework perfectly!

main phrases of the post + transcription + translation