The scholarly world is abuzz. During at least the past 20 years, and more likely during the last 33 years, more than a thousand potsherds inscribed in Aramaic have come onto the antiquities market. About 800 of these have now been published.1 They are richly informative—one inscribed sherd even refers to a previously unknown temple to the Israelite God. Yet this article is the first popular presentation of these inscriptions in English.
In ancient times, potsherds were used as a kind of notepaper; the scholarly name for inscribed sherds is ostraca. The newly published ostraca all date to the fourth century B.C., the period of transition from the end of the Achaemenid (Persian) empire to the beginning of the Hellenistic period.
Unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, which were acquired largely by official institutions in Jordan and in Israel, the new Aramaic ostraca have ended up in a variety of places and in numerous private collections, which makes them much more difficult to study as a whole. We are nevertheless in great debt to all the private collectors who have allowed their collections, large and small, to be studied and published.
The majority of the ostraca are simply accounting notes—probably to register taxes, paid mostly in kind—that were placed in a royal storeroom. They generally appear to be drafts that would have been recopied at the end of a month on a leather or papyrus roll.
Many of the best-preserved inscriptions contain precise dates. There is something strangely moving about knowing the exact date on which something was written nearly 2,400 years ago—for example, “27 Tammuz 039of the year 43” of Artaxerxes II (404–359 B.C.), the equivalent of July 20, 362 B.C. Thus far, all the dates on the ostraca are between 362 and 312 B.C.
The ostraca also mention other monarchs (whom they refer to as MLK, Aramaic for king [Hebrew: melech]): King Artaxerxes (III); King Alexander (the Great); and King Philip (Arrhidaeus). Antigonus is also mentioned, but without the title “king” (he was only a general).
The most frequent place name to appear in the hoard is Maqqedah. Scholars have long debated the location of this site mentioned in the Bible (see Joshua 10 and elsewhere). The most likely location is modern Khirbet el-Kôm, about 15 miles west of Hebron in the West Bank, as was shown by David A. Dorsey more than 20 years ago.2 This speculation is buttressed by the persistent rumors that the Aramaic ostraca hoard (as well as the recently surfaced First Temple-period bullae, or seal impressionsa) was found at Khirbet el-Kôm and the well-known fact that the site has been badly looted since 1967.3
Until the Babylonian conquest in the early sixth century B.C., this area was part of Judah. The evidence of these ostraca demonstrates what happened in the next couple hundred years: The area became populated by a wide mix of ethnic groups. We know this from the names on the ostraca, especially from the theophoric elements in the names. Names in ancient times 040frequently incorporated the name of a deity, which is what scholars call the theophoric element. Israelites often constructed their names in this way—with YHWH (Yahweh, the personal name of the Israelite God) and El—but so did Edomites, Canaanites, Aramaeans, North Arabs and other ethnic groups with their gods: Qos, Baal, Manawat, Shamash, Sin, Nabu, Isis, Osiris and so on.
In the Persian period (539–332 B.C.), Maqqedah was at first part of the North Arabian kingdom of Kedar. In the fourth century B.C., Maqqedah probably became an important administrative center in the Persian empire when King Artaxerxes II created the Persian province of Idumea at the margins of the Achaemenid empire (the province was near Egypt, which had revolted).
Probably the most intriguing aspect of the hoard is what it tells us about the religions at this time, particularly about the Israelite religion and its cultic places.
From archaeology and from the Bible, especially from the patriarchal traditions and from the early royal history recounted in the Book of Kings, we know that at the end of the second and beginning of the first millennium B.C. (Iron Age I), several local Israelite sanctuaries were located in Beersheba, Arad, Lachish, Gibeon, Bethel, Ophrah, Shechem, Samaria, Carmel, Dan and elsewhere. These local sanctuaries generally contained three main elements: an altar for animal sacrifices; a standing stone, or stele (Hebrew: masseba), the symbol of the presence of the deity; and a sacred tree (Hebrew: asherah).4
Some of these sanctuaries were open-air; others were connected with important buildings, for example, the First Temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem (the details 041of which are presented in 1 Kings 6–8) and those temples that Jeroboam I, king of Israel (the northern kingdom), built in Dan and Bethel (1 Kings 12:26–33).
Some of these local sanctuaries retained ancient local Canaanite traditions and may have been open to cults other than that of Yahweh, the God of Israel. These so-called “high places” were increasingly criticized by the Israelite prophets, especially by Amos and Hosea in the eighth century B.C.
When the Assyrians conquered Samaria in 722 B.C. and the northern kingdom of Israel disappeared, the Judahite king in Jerusalem tried once again to unify the Hebrew people around the exclusive cult of Yahweh and the Temple in Jerusalem. According to 2 Kings 18:4, King Hezekiah “abolished the high-places, smashed the sacred pillars, cut down every sacred tree” and told the people of Judah and Jerusalem that they must prostrate themselves only before the Jerusalem altar (2 Kings 18:22).
This centralization of the cult in Jerusalem was codified in the Book of Deuteronomy: “You shall not plant any kind of tree as a sacred tree (asherah) … You shall not set up a sacred pillar (masseba)” (Deuteronomy 16:21–22). The only cultic place should be “the place which Yahweh your God will choose out of all your tribes to put his Name that it may dwell there” (Deuteronomy 12:5), an implicit reference to the Jerusalem Temple.
This cultic reform met with resistance and had to be reimposed in 622 B.C. by King Josiah (2 Kings 23): The Jerusalem Temple again officially became the only Yahwistic cult place in the kingdom of Judah.
After the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple in 587 B.C. (2 Kings 25:9), a more modest Second Temple was built by the returning exiles (but not without difficulties) at the beginning of the Persian period. It was dedicated in 515 B.C. (Ezra 6:15–22). This Second Temple was the cultic center of the province of Judah.
But what about the sanctuaries in the other provinces and elsewhere in the huge Achaemenid empire?
Aramaic documents on papyri and ostraca discovered about a century ago at Elephantine, an island in Egypt in the southern Nile, revealed the existence of a fifth-century B.C. Jewish community connected with the Persian garrison. This Jewish community was apparently well organized, and the Jews used to meet in a Yahwistic temple, a “Temple of Yaho.” Yaho is a variant of Yahweh. From the papyri, we learn that this temple was destroyed in an anti-Jewish riot in 042410 B.C., but, after some time, the Jewish community succeeded in rebuilding it “to offer the meal-offering and the incense upon that altar just as formerly was done.”5 This “second” temple disappeared with the Jewish community in about 398 B.C. The most recent archaeological excavations at the site have identified the location of this temple, but nothing was left of the building itself.b
The existence of a Yahwistic temple in Elephantine was a great surprise to Biblical scholars and historians. But it was perhaps understandable because Elephantine was so far from Jerusalem—beyond the control of the religious establishment in Jerusalem.
Now, however, we may know of another such temple—at Maqqedah.
One of the new ostraca, a complete and reasonably well-preserved sherd consisting of six lines, refers to a number of temples that were apparently operating at the site. The ostracon is apparently a list of estates that were not subject to taxes because they were not cultivated areas, either because the soil was bad or because they contained some kind of sacred building—that is, a tomb or temple. One of the sacred buildings is identified as Beit Yaho, the “Temple of Yaho” (end of line 2), the same name as at Elephantine. Yaho was apparently the form of YHWH used during the Persian period.
Unfortunately, we know nothing about this Temple of Yaho at Maqqedah other than its name, given on the ostracon. But it may have shared features with the 043contemporaneous temple at nearby Mount Gerizim—in the province of Samaria, just south of modern Nablus—which has been excavated by Yitzhak Magen of the Israel Antiquities Authority.6
Another temple is mentioned at the end of line 1 of the ostracon, a “Temple of Uzzâ.” Uzzâ is a north Arabian deity, well known from north Arabian and Nabatean inscriptions. This deity had a temple in Petra. (Uzzâ is also mentioned later, in the Koran: Sura 53:19.)
A third temple mentioned in this ostracon is probably the “Temple of Nabu” (end of line 5), although the reading is not certain. Nabu is a deity of Mesopotamian origin, the son of the great Babylonian god Marduk, as well as the god of writing and wisdom and the patron of scribes.
That the third temple was associated with Nabu is supported not only by this ostracon, but also by what scholars call the onomasticon, the list of personal names mentioned in the ostraca hoard. As noted earlier, these personal names often incorporate a theophoric element that allows us to identify the ethnic group of the named person by the name of the deity he worshiped. Several names in the onomasticon of these ostraca contain the theophoric element “Nabu”—for example, Abdnabu (‘BDNBW), meaning “Servant of Nabu.” Names with this theophoric element have also been found in an Aramaic text from Egypt and at nearby sites such as Palmyra (an oasis in the Syrian desert) and Hatra (in northern Mesopotamia, about 50 miles southwest of Mosul). Both sites were capitals of kingdoms and have yielded many Aramaic inscriptions from this period.
Other ethnic communities at Maqqedah are reflected in other names in the ostraca hoard. The Edomite deity Qos is a frequent element in the onomasticon of the ostraca. Names such as Qosmalak (Qos is king), Qoshanan (Qos showed favor/grace), Qossidri (Qos is my help) and Elqos (Qos is god) were found on the list.
One especially interesting name is Qosyatib (Qos will restore/answer)—interesting not in itself, but in combination with the name of Qosyatib’s father, Hananyah. Hananyah is an Israelite name that means “Yah showed favor/grace.” The theophoric element Yah is another form of Yahweh that was commonly 044used in Judah after the Exile (during the First Temple period, the equivalent was generally -yahu). That a father and son would have different theophoric elements in their names suggests a possible mixture of ethnic/religious communities.
Whether or not these names represent different ethnic elements in the same family, it does seem clear that diverse ethnic and religious communities lived in the area during this period. After the Babylonian conquest of Judah in 587 B.C., the Edomite kingdom annexed this part of the former Judahite territory. In 552 B.C., the Edomites were defeated by the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus, who transformed their kingdom into part of a great Neo-Babylonian province of Arabia, the capital of which was at Tema, an oasis in the center of north Arabia. Nabonidus stayed there for ten years. When the Neo-Babylonian empire collapsed in 539 B.C., Maqqedah/Khirbet el-Kôm became part of the north Arabian kingdom of Kedar, which in turn disappeared in the early fourth century B.C., when Artaxerxes II created the Persian province of Idumea, probably to fight more effectively against the rebellious Egyptians.
These ostraca tell us a great deal about life at the end of the Persian period and the beginning of the Hellenistic period in what had first been southern Judah and then Idumea. These ostraca reflect the care and detailed precision for which Persian administration was 060celebrated, as well as the effectiveness of its system of tax collection. The ostraca twice mention a “tribute” and three times refer to a tax collector (GBY). They also reflect not only taxes in kind (wheat, barley, flour, etc.) but also a head tax (a list of personal names followed by “half a shekel”).7
We also see the extent to which the Edomites, now morphed into the linguistically equivalent Idumeans, had expanded territorially and overtaken what had been southern Judah. Finally, we learn that the ethnic and cultural mix in this area included—in addition to Idumeans—Arameans, north Arabs (closely related to the Nabateans), Judeans and Canaanites, all living together under Persian hegemony.
The scholarly world is abuzz. During at least the past 20 years, and more likely during the last 33 years, more than a thousand potsherds inscribed in Aramaic have come onto the antiquities market. About 800 of these have now been published.1 They are richly informative—one inscribed sherd even refers to a previously unknown temple to the Israelite God. Yet this article is the first popular presentation of these inscriptions in English. In ancient times, potsherds were used as a kind of notepaper; the scholarly name for inscribed sherds is ostraca. The newly published ostraca all date to the […]
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Israel Eph’al and Joseph Naveh, Aramaic Ostraca of the Fourth Century B.C. from Idumaea (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew Univ.), Israel Exploration Society, 1996); André Lemaire, Nouvelles inscriptions araméennes d’Idumée au musée d’Israël (Suppl. N° 3 à Trans; Paris: Gabalda, 1996); Lemaire, Nouvelles inscriptions araméennes d’Idumée, II. Collections Moussaieff, Jeselsohn, Welch et divers (Suppl. N° 9 à Trans; Paris: Gabalda, 2002).
2.
David A. Dorsey, “The Location of the Biblical Maqqedah”, Tel Aviv 7 (1980), pp. 185–193.
3.
Compare to William G. Dever, “Iron Age Epigraphic Material from the Area of Khirbet el-Kôm,” Hebrew Union College Annual 40–41, 1969–1970, pp. 139–204.
4.
André Lemaire, Naissance du monothéisme. Point de vue d’un historien (Paris: Bayard, 2003), pp. 24–25.
5.
Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt, I. Letters (Jerusalem: distributed by Eisenbrauns, 1986), p. 76.
6.
See Yitzhak Magen, “Mt. Gerizim—A Temple City,” Qadmoniot 33/2 (2000), pp. 74–118.
7.
Lemaire, “Taxes et impôts dans le Sud de la Palestine [IVe s. av. J.-C.]” (to be published in Transeuphratène).
