According to a group of scholars led by Scott Stripling, a two-centimeter-by-two-centimeter lead tablet bears the earliest example of writing in a very early form of the Hebrew script. The finding has not yet been formally published, and awaits verification by other experts, but could have major implications for the study of biblical history. Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:
Based on epigraphical analysis of the scans and lead analysis of the artifact, Stripling and his team date the curse tablet (or defixio) to the late Bronze Age, before or around 1200 BCE. If this dating is verified, it would make the text centuries older than the previous recordholder for oldest Hebrew text in Israel and 500 years older than the previously attested use of the tetragrammaton. Writing in a similar alphabet was discovered in the Sinai Peninsula dating to the beginning of the 16th century BCE.
[If authentic, the tablet] would be the first attested use of the name of God in the Land of Israel and would set the clock back on proven Israelite literacy by several centuries—showing that the Israelites were literate when they entered the Holy Land, and therefore could have written the Bible as some of the events it documents took place.
The curse tablet was discovered in earth originally taken from a cultic site at Mount Ebal, near biblical Shechem and today’s Nablus. Mount Ebal appears in Deuteronomy 11:29 as a place of “curses.” . . . The site . . . is regarded by archaeologists as an exceedingly rare and significant illustration of early Israelite settlement. It is the only one of its type in the area. A consensus of archaeologists date the clearly cultic site to the early Iron Age, somewhere around the 11th century BCE, or when the Israelites evidently began to settle the land of Canaan. Other archaeologists push that date back to the 12th century or Late Bronze Age.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/archaeologist-claims-to-find-oldest-hebrew-text-in-israel-including-the-name-of-god/