Endnote 13 – What’s in a Name?

As noted, these statistics are based on all inscriptions that had been published when You Shall Have No Other Gods was written. Many of the inscriptions (mainly seal inscriptions) were acquired in the antiquities market and hence their provenience is unknown, their date uncertain and some may be modern forgeries (see the comments of J. Naveh and B. Sass in Avigad and Sass, Corpus, pp. 12, 15, 453–460; Nili S. Fox, In the Service of the King: Officialdom in Ancient Israel and Judah [Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2000], pp. 23–32); they are classified as Israelite or non-Israelite on paleographic or onomastic grounds, which are not foolproof. Since we cannot exclude the possibility of forgery or erroneous classification as Israelite, the statistics were calculated in two ways. The first was restricted to names that appear in inscriptions on objects acquired in controlled archaeological excavations at Israelite sites or, if the names are explicitly identified as Israelite, abroad. The second consists of all Israelites whose names are preserved in epigraphic sources, including those found on the surface and those acquired in the antiquities market and identified as Israelite by paleographic or onomastic evidence. These two sets of statistics do not differ from each other significantly: In the corpus of names found in controlled archaeological excavations 213 (91.4 percent) are Yahwistic and 20 (8.6 percent) are likely to be pagan. This means that even if there are some forged or non-Israelite inscriptions in the larger corpus, they have not significantly skewed the evidence we are considering.