Lachish Letters

A Guardroom Full of Ash

On 29 January 1935, the third season of the Wellcome-Marston expedition at Tell ed-Duweir turned up inscribed potsherds in a small room in the eastern tower of the city's outer gateway. Sixteen came out of that guardroom, lying in the upper part of a burnt ash horizon against the room's east wall, soot-blackened and mostly broken. Two more came from elsewhere in the gate approach that season: one from ballast under a later Persian roadway, one from sieving the dump heap. Three more turned up in the final season of 1938, at three separate points on the mound. Twenty-one in all.

The dig was directed by J. L. Starkey. The sherds were first spotted, according to the account drawn from the expedition's own archive, by Hasan 'Awad al-Qatshan, a Negev Bedouin excavator who had trained on Petrie's digs as a teenager and worked at Tell ed-Duweir through the 1930s; he was assistant to the expedition's G. Lankester Harding, who with O. Tufnell then went back through all the sherds from the area and found two more fragments. It is worth noting that the fullest technical study of the corpus names no individual finder at all, so the credit rests on the archival and popular record rather than on the excavation report.

The excavation did not end well. On 10 January 1938 Starkey was murdered by bandits near Beit Jibrin, on his way to the opening of the new Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem. He is buried on Mount Zion. No expedition followed. The corpus was passed to H. Torczyner, later known as N. H. Tur-Sinai, who published the first edition in 1938.

"We Cannot See Azekah"

The best-known passage is on Lachish 4, near the end of the reverse. A subordinate reports to his superior that he is doing what he was told: watching the fire signals of Lachish, according to all the signs the commander has given, because they cannot see Azekah. In the fuller readings the clause about the signs is explicit, and it matters — this is a man confirming he is following a signalling protocol, not simply staring at a horizon.

Jeremiah 34:7 describes the identical moment from the capital's end: Nebuchadnezzar's army was fighting against Jerusalem and against all the cities of Judah that were left, against Lachish and against Azekah, for these alone remained of the fortified cities of Judah. Jeremiah 6:1 has the prophet telling Benjamin to raise a signal on Beth Haccherem as the evil looks out from the north. The ostracon is the same system, in operation, written by the men operating it.

The corpus is not all letters, despite the name. Lachish 1 is a bare list of personal names. Lachish 20 is a storage-jar label with a date formula. Several are too fragmentary to classify, and five of the guardroom pieces turned out to be fragments of the same broken vessel. One piece, Lachish 19, is roughly a century older than the rest — its script is late eighth century and its layer belongs to the Assyrian destruction of 701 BC, the campaign Micah 1:13 and 2 Kings 18:14 have in view. Calling Lachish 19 one of the last letters of Judah would be wrong.

"The Prophet" — and Why the App Will Not Name Him

Lachish 3 carries a line near its end about a letter that reached one Shallum son of Yada from the prophet, saying Beware. The Hebrew is hnb', "the prophet," with the definite article. It is the only certain occurrence of the word in the Hebrew epigraphic record — and it is why the word matters in the article on the Isaiah bulla, where a comparable word is spelled differently and without the article. A second alleged occurrence on Lachish 16 is widely printed but rejected in the fullest modern study of the corpus, which reads the crucial letter differently.

The prophet is not named, and the identification of him has been argued since the day the ostraca were published. Torczyner proposed Uriah son of Shemaiah, the prophet of Kiriath-jearim whom Jehoiakim had extradited from Egypt and executed in Jeremiah 26:20-23, and read the whole cache as the dossier of a court-martial arising from that affair. J. W. Jack and R. Dussaud, in the same year, proposed Jeremiah himself. S. Birnbaum objected that the Uriah reconstruction makes no sense — the danger to Uriah came from the king, so trying a subordinate for acting in line with royal policy is incoherent. M. Burrows dismissed it too.

The argument that settled the field was methodological. A 1946 review of the whole question held that nothing in the ostraca approaches proof for Jeremiah, that the prophet could be any of the other named prophets of the period or one of the many anonymous ones Scripture mentions, and that the real fault was treating twenty-one unrelated scraps as a single interrelated dossier by one sender about one theme. The fullest modern study agrees, and describes what we have as a fleeting glimpse of a shadowy figure.

So: the Lachish letters do not mention Jeremiah. An article that says they do is repeating a 1938 proposal that did not survive. What they do give a reader is better than a name — they show that in Judah's last months an army officer could write "the prophet" to a superior and expect to be understood, which is a great deal of context for the book of the prophet who was there.

One further live disagreement, on the famous line itself. Y. Yadin argued that the writer was tending the beacon of Lachish rather than watching for it, which would place him at Lachish and dismantle the standard reconstruction of letters sent to Lachish from an outpost. A. F. Rainey rebutted him in 1987 on the Hebrew idiom, and J. A. Emerton agreed with Rainey. The standard reading holds, but it was tested.

Scripture references

• Jeremiah 34:7 — Lachish and Azekah alone left of the fortified cities of Judah
• Jeremiah 6:1 — Raise a signal on Beth Haccherem — the same signalling system
• Jeremiah 26:20 — Uriah son of Shemaiah, the prophet Torczyner proposed and the field did not follow
• 2 Kings 18:14 — Sennacherib at Lachish in 701 BC — the earlier destruction Lachish 19 belongs to
• Micah 1:13 — Lachish addressed by the prophet in the eighth century

Sources

• ScholarshipA. Zammit, The Lachish Letters: A Reappraisal of the Ostraca Discovered in 1935 and 1938 at Tell ed-Duweir — Abigail Zammit, University of Oxford · DPhil thesis, 2016, in two volumes, freely downloadable from the Oxford University Research Archive. The fullest modern treatment, worked from Starkey's own unpublished reports and from physical examination of the objectsSupports: The find counts and findspots, the registration numbers and museum split, the date of Lachish 19, the translation of Lachish 4, the rejection of the second "prophet" on Lachish 16, and the history of the identification debate
• ScholarshipH. Torczyner (N. H. Tur-Sinai), Lachish I: The Lachish Letters — Harry Torczyner, later Naftali Herz Tur-Sinai — the editio princeps · Oxford University Press, 1938. Print onlySupports: The first edition of the corpus and the proposed identification of the prophet with Uriah son of Shemaiah
• ScholarshipD. Winton Thomas, on the identification of the prophet of the Lachish ostraca — D. Winton Thomas, University of Cambridge · 1946. The argument that no identification is possible and that treating the ostraca as one interrelated dossier is methodologically unsound. Print only. His surname is given here rather than in the article text because the app's automatic name-linking would otherwise send it to Thomas the apostleSupports: The refusal to identify the prophet, and the methodological objection to Torczyner, Jack and Dussaud
• Reference"Eyewitness to Discovery" — J. D. M. Green, Bible History Daily, 26 April 2021 — a review of Olga Tufnell's 'Perfect Journey', which he co-edited · Names Hasan 'Awad al-Qatshan as the man who first spotted the inscribed sherdsSupports: The individual finder credit
• Holding institutionThe British Museum, London - Lachish ostraca, registration numbers BM 125701-125715 and BM 16707 — The British Museum, which holds seventeen of the twenty-one · No link is given because britishmuseum.org refuses every automated request; the collection database opens normally in a browser, and the registration numbers above are the ones A. Zammit records from physical examination of the objects. The remaining four are registered to the Israel Antiquities AuthoritySupports: The whereabouts of the corpus and its registration numbers
• ScholarshipA. F. Rainey, "Watching out for the signal fires of Lachish" — Anson F. Rainey · Palestine Exploration Quarterly 119/2 (1987), 149-151. Print onlySupports: The rebuttal of Y. Yadin's "tending the beacon" reading
• ReferenceLachish Ostraca — Encyclopaedia Judaica, via Encyclopedia.com · Independent confirmation of the 1935 and 1938 counts and of the gate-room findspot, with translations of Lachish 3 and 4Supports: The find counts and the room adjacent to the city gate

Further reading

• A. Zammit, The Lachish Letters: A Reappraisal of the Ostraca (Oxford DPhil, 2016)
• Biblical Archaeology Society: Eyewitness to Discovery

Reflect

A soldier at a dark outpost wrote that he was still watching for the signals, exactly as instructed, while the towns around him went out one by one. What has God told you to keep doing while the news gets worse?