Arad Ostraca

A Fort's Filing System

Tel Arad in the eastern Negev was excavated between 1962 and 1967 in two halves: Yohanan Aharoni directed the upper mound with its Iron Age citadel, and R. Amiran directed the much older Early Bronze city on the lower slope. Aharoni's half produced something a small border fort has no business producing — more than a hundred Hebrew inscriptions written in ink on broken pottery, the ancient equivalent of scrap paper.

The best known group is the archive of Eliashib son of Eshyahu, the man in charge of stores in Stratum VI, around 600 BC. His correspondence is entirely unglamorous and that is why it is valuable: issue so much wine to the Kittim, so much flour, so much oil; send men to Ramat-Negev; do this quickly. Aharoni published the corpus as Arad Inscriptions, in Hebrew in 1975 and in English in 1981, and the material is held by the Israel Antiquities Authority and displayed in the Israel Museum.

The House of YHWH, and the Last Weeks

Two things in the archive reach directly into the biblical text. One is a reference to the house of YHWH — a fort clerk writing about the temple as an ordinary point of reference, in Hebrew, in Judah, before the exile. The other is the tone of the latest letters, which are the correspondence of a garrison under increasing pressure as the Babylonian advance closes in. Jeremiah 34:7 describes exactly this moment from the other end of the country, with the army of Babylon fighting against Jerusalem, against Lachish and against Azekah, and those alone left of the fortified cities of Judah. Arad is the southern edge of the same emergency.

Arad itself is in Scripture from much earlier: the Canaanite king of Arad fights Israel in Numbers 21, and Judges places the Kenites settling in the wilderness south of Arad. The citadel also contained a small sanctuary with two altars, which was dismantled and buried at some point in the fort's life — a fact often connected to the reforms of Hezekiah or Josiah described in 2 Kings, and which belongs to its own article rather than this one.

Six Writers, Twelve Authors, and What Literacy Means

In 2016 a Tel Aviv University group published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences applying image processing and machine learning to the handwriting on sixteen of the Arad ostraca. Their conclusion was that at least six distinct writers were at work, ranging from the fort commander down to a deputy quartermaster, and that all of them wrote with competent spelling and syntax. From this they argued for a relatively widespread literacy in Judah around 600 BC, and further, that a substantial amount of biblical literature could therefore have been compiled before the destruction of 586 BC rather than during or after the exile.

Christopher Rollston praised the method and made two objections, and only one of them is ever quoted. The first runs the opposite way from what a reader expects: he thinks the study too conservative. On his reading the epigraphic evidence for trained, standardised scribal education in Israel and Judah is already there two centuries earlier, and he sums it up as "I see your 600 and raise you 200" — that is, back to about 800 BC. The second is the one to weigh. The ostraca do not all come from a single moment: they span different strata across the seventh century and earlier, so six writers over decades is a thinner result than six writers at one desk. And six literate men at a military installation shows that the military-administrative apparatus of Judah could read and write, which nobody doubted. Literacy in an administrative elite is not literacy in the population, and the leap from one to the other is where the argument becomes an argument rather than a measurement.

One thing readers should not conflate. The same group published a follow-up in PLOS ONE in 2020 combining forensic document examination with the algorithms, after which Tel Aviv University publicised a figure of twelve authors for the Arad corpus. "Six writers" and "twelve authors" are different studies, on differently defined bodies of material, and quoting them interchangeably — as many summaries do — misrepresents both. Where the app stands: the ostraca are strong evidence that writing was an ordinary working tool of Judah's administration well before the exile, which is genuinely relevant to how the biblical books could have been written, copied and kept. They are not evidence about who could read in a village, and the more ambitious version of the claim outruns what sixteen potsherds can carry.

Scripture references

• Numbers 21:1 — The Canaanite king of Arad attacks Israel
• Judges 1:16 — The Kenites settle in the wilderness of Judah, south of Arad
• Jeremiah 34:7 — Lachish and Azekah alone left — the emergency the last Arad letters belong to
• 2 Kings 23:8 — Josiah defiles the high places from Geba to Beersheba — the reform often connected with the Arad sanctuary

Sources

• Holding institutionY. Aharoni, Arad Inscriptions — Yohanan Aharoni, for the Tel Arad excavation — the excavating body's own publication · Hebrew edition 1975; English edition, Israel Exploration Society, 1981. Cited in place of a museum object page: the Israel Museum's online collection could not be fetched. Print onlySupports: The corpus, the Eliashib archive and the stratigraphy
• ScholarshipS. Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., "Algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judah's military correspondence sheds light on composition of biblical texts" — Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin, Arie Shaus and colleagues, Tel Aviv University · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113/17 (2016), 4664-4669; DOI 10.1073/pnas.1522200113. The publisher's site refuses automated requests, so no URL is givenSupports: The six-writer result and the argument from it to pre-exilic composition
• ScholarshipC. Rollston, "The Tel Aviv University PNAS Study: Some Methodological Musings" — Christopher Rollston, George Washington University · Rollston Epigraphy, 13 April 2016, read in full. Both of the objections quoted in this article are his own words there: that the study's date of about 600 BC "is too conservative" because "we have such evidence already two hundred years prior to this" — "I see your 600 and raise you 200" — and that "the sociological conclusions about the 'proliferation of literacy' in Judah is not something that can be posited on the basis of this study". He notes that he has consulted for the Tel Aviv project and is not among the paper's authorsSupports: Both halves of Rollston's response: that the date is too late, and that the leap from six writers to widespread literacy does not follow
• ScholarshipA. Shaus, Y. Gerber et al., "Forensic document examination and algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judahite biblical period inscriptions reveal significant literacy level" — Arie Shaus, Yana Gerber, Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin, Barak Sober, Eli Piasetzky and Israel Finkelstein, Tel Aviv University — the first four contributed equally · PLOS ONE 15/9 (2020), e0237962. Open access, read in full. This is the study behind the later "twelve authors" figure, and the figure is the forensic examiner's rather than the algorithms': the paper analyses eighteen inscriptions and reports that "the forensic examination reveals a high probability of at least 12 writers within the analyzed corpus", against "4-7 writers for the same assemblage" from the earlier algorithmic workSupports: The distinction between the 2016 six-writer result and the later twelve-author figure
• ReferenceTel Aviv University: "The texts from the biblical-period fortress at Tel Arad were written by 12 different authors" — Tel Aviv UniversitySupports: The twelve-author figure as the university itself publicised it

Further reading

• Rollston Epigraphy: methodological musings on the PNAS study
• Tel Aviv University: the Arad texts and the twelve-author study

Reflect

The most valuable thing Eliashib left behind was a stack of routine supply orders he never expected anyone to read. What ordinary faithfulness of yours is worth more than you think?