A single verse near the conclusion of 1 Samuel 17 mentions that after defeating Goliath, David took the giant’s severed head to Jerusalem (1 Sam. 17.54). The present paper argues that this text’s communicating of David’s preeminence through his act of decapitation draws on the widespread understanding of heads as uniquely powerful and vulnerable, while triumph over a giant or monstrous body casts the future Israelite king as uniquely dominant over monstrous enemies at the physical extreme. Narratives of monster-combat that center an adversary’s head and its subsequent display are widespread; the present paper discusses the Gilgamesh/Ḫumbaba and Perseus/Medusa narratives, with their corresponding visual art manifestations, to show how the biblical allusion to monstrous capital display functions socially and literarily to constitute David’s power.

The alphabet employed by the Phoenicians was the inheritor of a long tradition of alphabetic writing and was itself adapted for use throughout the Mediterranean basin by numerous populations speaking many languages. The present contribution traces the origins of the alphabet in Sinai and the Levant before discussing different alphabetic standardizations in Ugarit and Phoenician Tyre. The complex adaptation of the latter for representation of the Greek language is described in detail, then some brief attention is given to likely—Etruscan and other Italic alphabets—and possible (Iberian and Berber) descendants of the Phoenician alphabet. Finally, it is stressed that current research does not view the Phoenician and other alphabets as inherently simpler, more easily learned, or more democratic than other writing systems. The Phoenician alphabet remains, nevertheless, an impressive technological development worthy, especially by virtue of its generative power, of detailed study ranging from paleographic and orthographic specifications to social and political contextualization.

Several verbal morphologies including the core orthography {ld} are attested in ninth- and eighth-century bce Aramaic texts from Sefire and Tell Fekheriyeh. From their similar contexts, all can be demon-strated to have the semantics ‘to remove’, but scholars are divided as to the root source and precise phonology of these verbs. The present paper demonstrates that these {ld} verbs belong to a cognate set descendant from proto-Semitic . The representation of the reflex of the interdental by {d} is a precocious development only attested broadly in later Aramaic, but its surfacing here can be ration-alized by appeal to diachronic phonology, phonotactics and linguistic typology. The consistent employment of developed orthography for this root is perhaps related to the existence of a broad and consistent early Aramaic curse tradition.

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