Endnote 4 – Burial Box of James the Brother of Jesus
The letters are generally very clear. The last letter of the name Joseph is a typical final pe. At the end of the upper stroke of the dalet is a lowering on the right. The following yod is slightly slanted and nearly as long as a waw. These two features appear from time to time in inscriptions from this period, especially on ossuaries. See Rahmani, Catalogue, number 801 for the dalet and numbers 125 and 218B for the yod.
The writing of the preposition dalet without a yod is also well known. Here it may be because the following name begins with a yod. Finally, one notes the cursive shape of the aleph, the shape of which is close to a Y. See Rahmani, Catalogue, numbers 256 and 455; cf. also, for instance, Yigael Yadin and Joseph Naveh, Masada I (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1989) pp. 24–26, notes 420–421; Ada Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic, Hebrew and Nabataean Documentary Texts from the Judaean Desert and Related Material. A. The Documents. B. Translation, Paleography, Concordance, (Jerusalem: Hebrew Univ., 2000), see esp. B, pp. 168–169.