Bible Synapse
Arad ostraca
Inscription · c. 600 BC · Assyria and Babylon · also called Arad letters, Eliashib archive
See it on the map and timeline
- Date
- c. 600 BC (most of the Hebrew letters)
- Found
- Tel Arad, Israel, 1962. Found in Yohanan Aharoni’s excavations of the fortress at Tel Arad in the 1960s. The Eliashib archive, ostraca 1 to 18, came from a single room in the fort’s casemate wall, in the last Judahite level.
- Now
- Israel Museum (many of the ostraca), Jerusalem
- Passages
- Psalms 137:7, Obadiah 1:8–14
What it is
More than 200 inscribed potsherds from the fortress of Arad, about 100 of them in Hebrew. The best known, from the fort’s last years around 600 BC, are letters and lists addressed to Eliashib, who handed out the fort’s supplies, ordering wine, flour, bread and oil to be issued, some of it to the Kittim, probably Greek or Cypriot mercenaries in Judah’s service. One letter (Ostracon 24) orders reinforcements against a threat from Edom, and another (Ostracon 18) mentions “the house of YHWH”.
How it connects to the Bible
The letters show the daily running of Judah’s southern frontier in the last years before Jerusalem fell in 586 BC, in the time of Jeremiah. The danger from Edom fits the Bible’s bitter memory of Edom’s part in Jerusalem’s fall: “Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem” (Psalm 137:7; see also Obadiah). Many scholars take the house of YHWH in Ostracon 18 to be the Temple in Jerusalem.
What scholars debate
Other scholars doubt that the house of YHWH in Ostracon 18 means the Jerusalem Temple.