Just for curiosity's sake, I built SQLite 3.2.7 (from 2005-09-24) and 2.8.17 (bugfix on the old 2.8 line, from 2005-12-19) and tried this in the shell in both:

    sqlite> create table test_tbl ( test TEXT );
    sqlite> insert into test_tbl values ( "0123" );
    sqlite> select * from test_tbl;

Both give the same output: 0123. Were you using an API wrapper around SQLite that was doing its own coercions, perhaps?