The Lachish letters — "we are watching for the signals of Lachish"
Letters from the last weeks of Judah, found in the ash of the gate they were written in, name the two cities Jeremiah names — one of them apparently already dark.
Confirmed by the groundInscriptionc. 588 BC
Military dispatches written in ink on potsherds, found in the burnt debris of the gate. Letter IV reports watching for the fire-signals of Lachish "because we cannot see Azekah". Jeremiah, writing in the same months, says the king of Babylon's army was fighting against Jerusalem, Lachish and Azekah — "for these defenced cities remained."
We are watching for the fire-signals of Lachish, according to all the signs which my lord has given, for we cannot see Azekah.
- Found
- The gate guardroom at Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir), Israel, 1935 — James Starkey's excavation
- Now held at
- Israel Museum, Jerusalem; British Museum, London
- Language
- Hebrew
- How it reached us
- Dug up, or still standing where it was built.
What it shows
The letters name no biblical figure with certainty. What they show is the situation Jeremiah describes, in the right place, at the right moment.
How historians use it
One of the largest corpora of pre-exilic Hebrew prose; standard in the study of Hebrew epigraphy and of the Babylonian campaign.
In Scripture
Connects to
Sources
- Torczyner, Lachish I: The Lachish Letters (1938)
These summaries are written in English for now. Translations follow.