Pieces of the Puzzle

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I sometimes think of Biblical studies as a vast jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. The book just published by Robert Deutsch and Michael Heltzer gives us 40 new pieces of that puzzle. In comparison with the slow pace at which inscriptions like these ordinarily turn up, this is an extraordinary number to have at once.

It will take a long time to absorb and assimilate the information they contain, to tease out their implications. What follows, then, is a preliminary assessment of part of the collection. I purposely discuss some items that might seem least accessible to BAR readers. It’s not difficult to appreciate the importance of the personal seal of Jeremiah’s scribe (with or without a fingerprint). But the other items are just as interesting, even if it’s not as easy to coax their stories out of them.

Five bronze arrowheads with archaic alphabetic inscriptions are included in the collection. The inscriptions are engraved horizontally from tang to point on the blades. One face of each blade is inscribed “arrow of” followed by a personal name. On the other face is the patronymic—that is, “son of” followed by the father’s name—or the title of the person named on the first side.

Inscribed arrowheads of this kind have been known since 1926, when one was found in a tomb in Lebanon.¹ The five new ones bring the total to 32, while several more are held in museums and private collections.² Only the first one, however, was recovered in a controlled archaeological excavation. All the others, including the five new ones, were acquired from the antiquities market, so that the exact places where they were discovered are unknown.

In general, though, these arrowheads seem to have come from Lebanon and southern Syria. One is said to have been found near Tyre, the site of the ancient Phoenician capital. Another was purchased from a farmer 040in the Beq‘a Valley, between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountain ranges in northern Lebanon and southern Syria. Deutsch and Heltzer indicate that the five new arrowheads also come from Lebanon and were acquired from a Lebanese dealer. Some of the titles and names engraved on the arrowheads give further clues that conform to this picture. One owner is called SdDNY, “the Sidonian,” referring to the great Phoenician seaport on the Lebanese coast. The father of the owner of the arrowhead excavated 70 years ago is called ‘KY, “Man of Accho,” after the southern Phoenician city that today is the Israeli seaport of Acre or Accho, some 13 miles north of Mt. Carmel.

The only clear exceptions to this pattern of Lebanese-Syrian origin are five arrowheads thought to have been found in 1953 by a farmer near the village of El-Khadr, a couple of miles west of Bethlehem. Three of these were acquired from antiquities dealers by Frank Cross and J. T. Milik, who published them in 1954; the other two were recognized by Cross in 1979, when he saw them in private collections in Jerusalem. All five come from the same hoard, which also included at least 21 uninscribed arrowheads and a number of other objects.

The writing on the five El-Khadr arrowheads is more archaic in appearance than that on the others. On the basis of our admittedly limited knowledge of alphabetic writing in this early period, they should be dated to the late 12th or early 11th century B.C. All the others lack for the most part the extremely archaic letter forms of the El-Khadr group. The others can be assigned, generally speaking, to later in the 11th century B.C.

Nothing in the five newly published arrowheads requires a reevaluation of these estimates of the antiquity of the group as a whole. In terms of script and language, the five new inscriptions fit comfortably into the larger, 11th-century group. On the other hand, the names and titles engraved on the blades seem to point towards an important new understanding of these unusual objects.

One of the newly published arrowheads is inscribed “Arrow of Zakarbaal, king of Amurru.” Another arrowhead bearing this same legend was published in 1982.³ The arrowhead found in the Beq‘a Valley tells us who Zakarbaal’s father was: It is inscribed “Arrow of Zakarbaal, son of Ben Anath.” The second arrowhead in the new group probably belonged to the same Ben Anath, and its inscription gives us his father’s name: “Arrow of Ben Anath, son of MRS|.”⁴ Thus, three generations of the same family are documented—and a royal family at that!

We should not be surprised that some of these arrowheads originated in a royal household. The title on another arrowhead in the new collection is inscribed “Arrow of KTY, cupbearer of ‘Abday.”⁵ In Biblical Hebrew, a cupbearer is always a royal officer, whether in the service of the king of Egypt (Genesis 40:1), the king of Persia (Nehemiah 1:11), or the king of Israel (1 Kings 10:5=2 Chronicles 9:4). All this makes it likely that Abday was a high-ranking official, if not actually a king.

Incidentally, the cupbearer’s name suggests that he may have been a Cypriote by birth; KTY (“Kittay”?) means “Man of Kition,” probably referring to the seaport on the southeastern coast of Cyprus near modern Larnaca, which was the entry point for Phoenician influence on the island.

What about the kingdom of Amurru, whose royalty is documented for three generations in this rare collection of arrowheads? Until now we knew nothing about Amurru in the 11th century, although we know a great deal about Amurru’s earlier history. During much of the second millennium B.C., Amurru was an important state in Syria. The inscribed arrowheads of King Zakarbaal and his family provide a puzzling but decisive clue to the survival of this state in the Iron I period (about 1200–1000 B.C.).

From the mid-third millennium B.C., cuneiform inscriptions from Mesopotamia use the term Amurru to mean “Westerners,” people who came from regions west of Mesopotamia. In the late third millennium, the Amurru seem to have been regarded as a nuisance and a persistent threat by the rulers of the Sumero-Akkadian cities of Mesopotamia. They described the Amurru as barbaric and uncouth, “vagabonds who have never known what a town was.”⁶ But soon after, rulers with West Semitic names begin to establish dynasties in the chief cities of Mesopotamia and Syria.⁷

In the Bible, the indigenous peoples of the Promised Land are often referred to generally as Amorites, a designation roughly equivalent to the older term Amurru. In a stricter sense, the Biblical Amorites were pre-Israelite inhabitants of the lands east of Jordan. The exact relationship of the Biblical Amorites to the Amurru of the beginning of the second millennium, however, is unclear.

The first unquestionable evidence for the existence of a country called Amurru comes from the famous Mari tablets, the great cuneiform archive found at Tell Hariri, known in antiquity as Mari, on the western bank of the Euphrates. In the early 18th century B.C., Mari reached the zenith of its power and prestige. It was the northwestern outpost of Mesopotamian civilization. In the Mari tablets the Land of Amurru is located south of Qatna in central Syria. The precise location of this land, as we learn from somewhat later records, was the northern part of the Beq‘a, a strategically important area that controlled the region between the Mediterranean coast and the plain of Homs. Amurru probably played a major role in international trade at this time.

In the Late Bronze Age (about 1550–1200 B.C.), Amurru found itself squarely in the middle, between the two great international powers, Egypt, which laid claim to southern and coastal Syria, and the Hittite kingdom to the north. The kings of Amurru were courted, cajoled and bullied by the great kings of Egypt and Hatti. Far from being passive victims of this situation, however, the kings of Amurru took advantage of it, playing both ends against the middle. This was especially true of one extraordinary king of Amurru named Aziru the son of Abdi-Ashirta, under whose clever and 041often shifty administration Amurru enjoyed substantial prominence and probably a fair amount of prosperity.

We know the names of Aziru’s successors, but, before the discovery of the arrowheads, we had no information about Amurru after 1200 B.C.

Now come the arrowheads!

From these inscriptions we learn that the Amurru state persisted in some fashion into at least the 11th century, when it continued to be ruled by a king.

The function of these inscribed arrowheads has been something of a scholarly crux. Cross and Milik have argued that there were guilds of professional warriors in Palestine and southern Syria in the Late Bronze Age (surviving into the early Iron Age) and that these arrowheads belonged to members of the guild. In support of this contention, they note that some of the names found on the arrowheads—including Ben Anath—also appear in lists of archers and other professional warriors in the state archives of Ugarit.^a Ben Anath is also the name of one of the warriors in Egyptian records from the time of Ramesses II (about 1279–1212 B.C.).⁸ This same name is also found in the Bible: the warrior Shamgar (son of) Ben Anath (Judges 3:31). The point is not that any of the warriors named on the arrowheads can be identified with specific Ugaritic warriors or with the father of the Biblical Shamgar, but only that the names of warriors may have been traditional and hereditary, passed down within military guilds. If so, members of the royal family of Amurru in the Iron I period may have belonged to these ancient guilds of aristocratic warriors.

Another possibility: If the engraved arrowheads were actually shot in battle, they may have been used to identify an archer when the fight was over and it was time to divide the spoil. An inscribed arrowhead lodged in the chest of a fallen enemy or lying among the charred ruins of a burned building would prove that the warrior whose name appeared on the blade would be entitled to a share of the plunder. Especially in siege warfare, which often ended in a fiery conflagration, the only visible token of the attackers that remained when the hostilities were over would often be the metal arrowheads.

In any event these seemingly obscure artifacts that have already made a significant contribution to the history of the development of the alphabet now add a chapter to the history of Amurru and of warfare in 042the early Biblical period.

Before we turn to another inscription from the collection, a bit of background is in order.

In the fall of 1967, archaeologist William Dever undertook a salvage operation of some recently opened and partially robbed tombs near the village of Khirbet el-Kom in the Judean Hills west of Hebron. Dever had learned of the looting of the tombs after he discovered a substantial collection of material from the eighth-seventh centuries B.C. being offered by an antiquities dealer in the Old City of Jerusalem. The material was said to have come from a single discovery.

When he arrived at the site of Khirbet el-Kom, Dever was quickly able to identify the tomb from which the collection of antiquities had been looted. He was also keenly aware of the archaeological potential of the area. The important Biblical-period mounds of Lachish and Tell Beit Mirsim were not far away, and the landscape in the immediate vicinity of the tomb was sprinkled with ruins, mostly dating to the Iron Age.

Dever concentrated on two tombs that had been recently robbed. He recovered and published a substantial amount of material, all dating to the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. Among the finds was a wealth of epigraphic material (written remains)—inscribed pottery, inscribed weights, random graffiti scratched into the walls of the tombs and two crude but formal grave inscriptions.⁹ The longer of these grave inscriptions came from a pillar between two burial vaults. When Dever entered the tomb and saw this pillar, the inscription was gone. Instead there was a recently gouged hole. Fortunately, the thieves had not yet carried the pilfered block of limestone beyond a nearby village, where Dever retrieved it.

It is the epitaph of a man named Uriah, who invokes the blessing of the Israelite God Yahweh on himself, though details of his words are obscured by a jumble of scratches and grooves that litter the surface of the stone. The text exhibits the language and orthography (spelling conventions) of the southern or Judahite dialect of Hebrew in the pre-exilic period. Both the script and the associated pottery are typical of the region in the latter part of the eighth century B.C.

I had just assigned the Uriah epitaph to a graduate seminar when I learned of the tomb inscription published in the Deutsch and Heltzer book. I instantly recognized the script and even the soft Senonian chalk that Dever says is characteristic of the area around Khirbet el-Kom.¹⁰ This new inscription must be from el-Kom or its immediate vicinity—in short, an el-Kom inscription that Dever had not been able to rescue from the antiquities market.¹¹

The new inscription has two lines. Deutsch and Heltzer read the inscription as follows: “Bless your 043stonecutter(s)! In this will rest the elders.”

Unfortunately, the linguistic analysis that lies behind this reading is badly flawed. Deutsch and Heltzer fail to take into account the rules of spelling and grammar that prevailed in the period from which the inscription comes.¹²

Making the slight, but significant, required changes, the inscription can more accurately be translated as follows: “Blessed be your stonecutter! May he lay old people to rest here!”

The Hebrew word rendered “stonecutter” (hsb) is the same word used in the famous Siloam inscription to refer to the workers who cut the tunnel in the rock beneath the city of Jerusalem.^b Here the word must refer to the man who has hewn the burial chambers out of the limestone and otherwise shaped the cave for its use as a tomb. Perhaps he is called “your stonecutter” because he assumed that any reader of the inscription would be a citizen of the region and therefore a beneficiary of the craftsman’s work (“the man who cuts [a tomb] for you”).

The second line should probably be understood as an idiomatic and possibly traditional blessing. The underlying idea is that it is a blessing to bury the members of one’s family in their old age, that is, not in their youth or the prime of their lives. This good fortune is wished upon the stonecutter, who, being himself a member of the community, is also expected to make use of the tombs for his own family.

Deutsch and Heltzer would interpret the second line as an identification of the tomb as a resting place for the leaders of the local community (“the elders”). This is possible, although, it seems to me, less likely; the stonecutter may be expressing the wish that those who will occupy the results of his labors will be the distinguished leaders of the community.

Deutsch and Heltzer conclude their book with a group of metal objects—bowls and cymbals (could the “cymbals” be the tops of bowls?)—all bearing Phoenician or Aramaic inscriptions of the early Persian period (sixth or fifth century B.C.). They were discovered, we are told, during construction at Elyakhin, a modern settlement just south of H|adera, Israel,^c and about three miles from the Mediterranean coast. Instead of reporting the finds to the authorities, the contractor or excavator unfortunately sold them on the antiquities market. The bowls seem to have been votive offerings dedicated at the sanctuary of a group of gods called ‘Ashtars. A votive offering is something given to a deity in accordance with a vow. Typically, someone would promise to make such an offering when asking for divine help; then, after the help had been granted, the petitioner would dedicate the votive offering out of gratitude and veneration. The Aramaic dedications on some of the objects show that the person making the offering was doing so in thanks to the gods for saving or sparing his or her life.¹³

Only one of these votive inscriptions is in Phoenician. It identifies the bowl on which it is written as “[t]hat which Eshmunyaton and Magon and Baalpilles gave to their lords, the ‘Ashtars.” Eshmunyaton, Magon and Baalpilles are all good Phoenician names. The expression “to their lords” is evidently plural,¹⁴ and this means that the following word must also be plural—“the ‘Ashtars.”¹⁵

In one of the Aramaic inscriptions, the ‘Ashtars are further identified by the phrase “who are in the Sharon.”¹⁶ This is the Biblical Plain of Sharon, which extends along the coast of Israel for about 50 miles from Joppa (modern Jaffa) north to Mt. Carmel. This plain, which is only about 10 miles wide, now has a well-deserved reputation for fertility; it is dotted with productive orange groves. In antiquity, however, the Sharon was regarded as forbidding and inhospitable. At its center is a region of red sand that rises up to form high, uninhabitable dunes. On both sides of this mass of sand flow perennial streams that are often in flood in winter, converting the plain to a vast swamp. Moreover, in Biblical times, much of the Sharon was covered with a dense hardwood forest. Travellers on the Via Maris, the famous coastal route, tended to avoid this part of the coastal plain, skirting it to the east and following the higher and firmer ground of the foothills.

The ‘Ashtars must have been a group of deities worshiped collectively in the Sharon.

The corresponding feminine form is ‘Ashtart (Biblical ‘Ashtoreth), a well-known Phoenician and Canaanite goddess. Her Mesopotamian equivalent was Ishtar. In Mesopotamia, Ishtar was the goddess par excellence, so much so that her name came to mean “goddess.”

From the 14th century B.C. we know of a male god named ‘Ashtar, or rather ‘Athtar, documented in the literature of the great Syrian coastal city of Ugarit. In an Ugaritic myth, when the god Baal, lord of the earth, is confined to the underworld, ‘Ashtar attempts to take his place. But he proves too small even to sit on Baal’s throne; he is clearly inadequate to replace him as lord of the earth.

There is another reference to ‘Ashtar—in the ninth century B.C. on the famous Mesha Stele (or Moabite Stone). In this inscription, Mesha, king of Moab, describes his rebellion against—and military victory over—the Israelites. The stele frequently mentions the Moabite god Chemosh. In one reference, however, where Mesha sacrifices the defeated people to his god, he refers to the god as “‘Ashtar-Chemosh.”^d

What relation this may have to the Ugaritic god ‘Ashtar remains unclear. Equally cloudy is the relationship of the Ugaritic deity ‘Ashtar or the Moabite ‘Ashtar-Chemosh to the ‘Ashtars in our Persian period inscription.

What does seem clear is that the ‘Ashtars are an 062interesting new group of Persian-period deities whose cult seems to have been centered in the Plain of Sharon.

One avenue of speculation is to connect them to the swampy condition of the area in Biblical times. According to the interpretation of the late Theodore H. Gaster, the Ugaritic myth referred to earlier was concerned with the change in seasons: Baal’s departure into the underworld represented the onset of the dry season. ‘Athtar was the god of artificial irrigation. Baal, whose principal theophany was the thunderstorm, was responsible for the rains. In Baal’s absence, ‘Athtar tried to replace him, but artificial irrigation was inadequate as a permanent substitute for the rains, which returned only when Baal escaped from the underworld. Gaster believed that the Mesopotamian Ishtar was originally a goddess of irrigation, whose prominence was at least in part a consequence of the importance of canals, irrigation ditches and other earthworks in the maintenance of civilization in the Mesopotamian marshlands. In addition, the Arabic ‘Athtar, a prominent deity in the pantheon of pre-Islamic Arabia, was an irrigation god in origin; the Arabic term ‘attari, meaning “artificially irrigated soil.”

Perhaps the ‘Ashtars of our inscription had a connection with irrigation, the beginnings of swamp-draining that would one day make the Plain of Sharon habitable. For the moment, however, this is only an interesting line of speculation. Perhaps some future discovery will tell us more.

I sometimes think of Biblical studies as a vast jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. The book just published by Robert Deutsch and Michael Heltzer gives us 40 new pieces of that puzzle. In comparison with the slow pace at which inscriptions like these ordinarily turn up, this is an extraordinary number to have at once. It will take a long time to absorb and assimilate the information they contain, to tease out their implications. What follows, then, is a preliminary assessment of part of the collection. I purposely discuss some items that might seem least accessible […]