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Home > Magazines > BAR > November/December 1992

The World’s Oldest Poorbox

By Gabriel Barkay

I believe I may have discovered the world’s earliest poorbox—a tangible expression of Israel’s ancient concern for the needy among its people. On one of my frequent visits to Jerusalem’s Rockefeller Museum, I noticed an object that I had seen many times before in one of the cases: a pottery bowl with an inscription. It had been unearthed long ago—in fact, 80 years ago, during the 1911–1912 excavations at Beth Shemesh in the Shephelah, the lowland west of Jerusalem, in a dig headed by the British archaeologist Duncan Mackenzie.1 But this time I decided to study it anew because […]

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Footnotes

1.

B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), used by this author, is the alternate designation corresponding to B.C. often used in scholarly literature.

2.

An ostracon (plural, ostraca) is a potsherd with writing on it.

Endnotes

1.

See Duncan Mackenzie, “Excavations at Ain Shems (Beth-Shemesh),” Palestine Exploration Fund Annual 2 (1912–1913), pp. 86–88, pl. 54:13; J.H. Iliffe, Palestine Archaeological Museum, Gallery Book, Iron Age (Israelite Period) (Jerusalem, 1940), p. 55, no. 518.

2.

R. Zadok, The Pre-Hellenistic Israelite Anthroponymy and Prosopography (Leuven, 1988), p. 191.

3.

Gabriel Barkay, “A Bowl with the Hebrew Inscription dq,” Israel Exploration Journal 40 (1990), pp. 124–129.

4.

Yohanan Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1981), pp. 29–30.

5.

See S.E. Lowenstamm: Encyclopedia Biblica, vol. 4; s.v., btkm (letter), cols. 969–971 (in Hebrew).