Name of Biblical Judge Surfaces

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An inscription bearing the personal name Jerubba‘al was uncovered in 2019 at Khirbet al-Ra‘i, a small Iron Age site located near Lachish in the Judean Foothills. Written in black ink on a small sherd from a ceramic jug, the inscription was found inside a grain silo dated to the late 12th or early 11th century B.C.E., the time of the biblical judges.1 The name Jerubba‘al appears in the Book of Judges (Judges 6:32), where it is given as another name for Gideon: “Therefore on that day he was called Jerubba‘al.” A few years earlier, an inscription bearing the name […]

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Footnotes

1. For more, see Mitka R. Golub, “What’s in a Name? Personal Names in Ancient Israel and Judah,” BAR, Summer 2020.

Endnotes

1.
Christopher Rollston, Yosef Garfinkel, Kyle H. Keimer, Gillan Davis, and Saar Ganor, “The Jerubba‘al Inscription from Khirbet al-Ra‘i: A Proto-Canaanite (Early Alphabetic) Inscription,” Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology 2 (2021), pp. 1–15.

2.
Yosef Garfinkel, Mitka R. Golub, Haggai Misgav, and Saar Ganor, “The ʾIšbaʿal Inscription from Khirbet Qeiyafa,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 373 (2015), pp. 217–233.