The Arad ostraca — "the house of YHWH"
Everyday army paperwork from a Judahite fort refers to the temple of YHWH and carries the same stock of personal names as the biblical books of the period.
Confirmed by the groundInscriptionc. 600 BC
More than a hundred inked potsherds from a Judahite border fort: ration orders, troop movements, a warning about Edom. Several mention "the house of YHWH", and the names on them — Hananyahu, Gemaryahu, Meshullam — are the ordinary Judahite names of the same period as Jeremiah.
…and as to the matter which you commanded me — it is well. He is in the house of YHWH.
- Found
- The fortress at Tel Arad, Israel, 1962 — Yohanan Aharoni's excavation
- Now held at
- Israel Museum, Jerusalem
- Language
- Hebrew
- How it reached us
- Dug up, or still standing where it was built.
What it shows
No biblical individual is securely identified in the archive. Its value is the ordinary texture: literacy, administration, religion and names.
How historians use it
Central to the debate on the spread of literacy in late-monarchic Judah, including recent handwriting analyses.
In Scripture
Connects to
Sources
- Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions (1981)
These summaries are written in English for now. Translations follow.