Israelite Inscriptions from the Biblical Period

What is an inscription?

Various kinds of ancient writing that were not preserved in the Bible have come to light through archaeological excavations or other means. These inscriptions were mostly used for everyday needs, such as recording ownership and deliveries of commodities, or writing letters, but some were commemorative or religious in nature. Even mundane inscriptions offer valuable information about history, society, religion, economy, literacy, and much else. They are important not only for the variety of subjects they touch on but also because they are contemporaneous with the events they refer to and have not undergone subsequent editing or recopying that would have introduced revisions and errors. They are little pieces of “real life.”

This is not to say that their function is always clear to us. Many inscriptions are terse, readily comprehensible to ancient readers but opaque to us. Moreover, in certain inscriptions, people’s names or titles are preceded by the multivalent Hebrew preposition le- or la-, which can mean “to,” “belonging to,” “for,” “pertaining to,” and “according to.” The connotation differs from one type of inscription to another, and its significance is not always evident. As a result, scholars disagree as to whether, for example, certain ostraca (broken pieces of pottery used as writing material) are delivery orders or tax receipts, or whether certain seal impressions on jars indicate ownership of the contents or the authority certifying the jars’ capacity. Longer inscriptions may be fragmentary or idiosyncratic, leading to uncertainty about their function and significance.

Many types of inscriptions appear in the Posen Library. Strikingly, for reasons that we do not know, no certain examples of Israelite royal inscriptions—a genre in which kings boast of their achievements (e.g., war, public works) or record their gifts to the gods—have been found, although several inscriptions of this type from smaller neighboring states have been discovered.

What kinds of materials were inscriptions written on?

Inscriptions were written on various materials, such as ceramic containers, ostraca, stone, plaster, papyrus, and parchment. Papyrus was a common writing material in ancient Israel, but only two papyrus inscriptions have survived from the First Temple period, as papyrus disintegrates in the moist climate of the land of Israel. Various types of pottery, particularly jars, bore inscriptions written with ink or incised in the clay before or after the vessel was fired. The inscriptions record the name of the owner (or maker) of the container and/or its contents, or its capacity, or the place where the contents originated.

Ostraca were used for writing information that was needed for only a short time, such as letters and delivery dockets for shipments of commodities. The largest group of ostraca are from Samaria, the capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. More than one hundred ostraca were found that date from the first quarter of the eighth century BCE. The texts refer to jars of wine and olive oil and include a date (the regnal year of an unnamed king), a person’s name with the polyvalent prefix le-, and the town from which the jars were sent. In addition, some identify the contents of the jar, and others add the name of the clan district in which the town is located and one or more other names, which may be those of the senders. If the prefix le- means “to,” then the ostraca may be records of shipments by rural estate managers to their owners who were serving as officials in the capital. If it means “belonging to,” the ostraca are probably records of commodities sent by farmers to the king as tax payments. The ostraca were found in a building next to the royal palace, and because some of them were fragments from the same broken jar, it is likely that they were all written there, to serve as records of incoming shipments; the information may have been based on bullas (small lumps of clay stamped with seal impressions) that accompanied the jars, much like the “fiscal bullas,” and was presumably later transferred to a ledger. Some of the names on the ostraca contain forms of God’s name (YHWH), and others contain baal, the name of a Canaanite deity, which might indicate that the individuals bearing those names were the sons of Baal worshipers. But because the basic meaning of baal is “lord,” it could also refer to YHWH, as it does in names such as Bealiah (Baaliyah), meaning “YH(WH) is my Lord,” in 1 Chronicles 12:6.

Inscribed seals were used to stamp the names of their owners on clay. Some were stamped on containers to identify the owners of their contents or to indicate some other type of relationship. Others were stamped on clay bullas (tags) attached either to letters (to identify their writers) or to legal documents (to certify the parties or witnesses to the document). Hundreds of seals and seal impressions containing inscriptions in Hebrew and other scripts are known, dating mostly from the eighth through sixth centuries BCE. The seals usually bear the owner’s name, often the name of his or her father and occasionally grandfather, and sometimes the owner’s title or another phrase. Some of the owners are government or religious officials, and a few are individuals known from the Bible. Many seals also contain interesting iconography.