Archaeologica.org

The inscription hints that a well-organized state was functioning in the 10th century B.C., with Jerusalem as its seat.

The Tel Zayit abecedary suggests no such thing. All it suggests is that somebody in the tenth century knew how to write a Hebrew-style alphabet. Given that we know (e.g., from the Amarna letters) that Bronze Age (earlier than the tenth century!) Canaan supported a scribal class, why should we be surprised to find that at least one person knew how to write an alphabet? Okay, maybe the abecedary suggests a little bit more than that. Given that the inscriber seems to have made some mistakes in the alphabet, that may indicate that it was originally a student exercise or practice text—which would give us two literati in that place and time. Yes, I realize that in this paragraph I’m consciously minimizing the importance of the Tel Zayit abecedary. The abecedary really is truly interesting for the meager hints it gives us about the development of alphabetic writing, letter forms, and maybe about scribal culture in the tenth-century southern Levant. But it is still a long and winding road from “some guy in the southern Levant scratched an alphabet in stone” to “the earliest Hebrew scriptures might have been written down in the tenth century.” There is simply no link at all between the stone and the scriptures, except for the alphabet. If you want to try to use an artifact to show literacy in the tenth century, the Gezer calendar is a much, much better bet (and even it can’t give you “some the scriptures might have been written in tenth century”).