Samaria Ostraca

Found in the Fill

Harvard University excavated Samaria — the capital Omri bought and built, and the modern village of Sebastia — from 1908, and in the third season of 1910 the dig produced 102 inscribed potsherds. G. A. Reisner directed the 1909 and 1910 seasons with C. S. Fisher as his architect; D. G. Lyon reported the find publicly in 1911, and the three of them published the excavation in 1924. No individual finder is recorded.

Where they were found matters more than most things in this article. They were not lying on a floor. They were in a fill laid down to level the ground before a large building went up — building rubble, in other words, into which somebody had swept the palace's discarded paperwork. The excavators named the structure the Ostraca House after them. The consequence is blunt: the sherds are out of primary context, they cannot be tied to the room they were used in, and the archaeology cannot date them beyond saying they were already rubbish when the fill was laid.

Only 63 of the 102 are legible enough to be useful. Reisner published about sixty; I. T. Kaufman substantially enlarged the readable corpus in 1966 by working from the expedition's original glass negatives, and M. Richelle re-edited the whole set from photographs in 2022. One charming detail of the original filing system survived: oil deliveries were written on grey ware and wine deliveries on reddish sherds.

What a Docket Says

These are not letters. They are administrative notes of a few words: a year, a place or a clan, a name, and a commodity. Two distinct formats appear. In one, the year is spelled out in Hebrew words — the ninth year, the tenth year — and the note gives a district, a recipient and the goods, aged wine or fine oil. In the other the year is written with Egyptian hieratic numerals, and the note gives a clan, a recipient with his father's name, a second personal name, and the town within the clan, and the commodity is always wine.

The Hebrew is northern, and that is one of the corpus's quiet contributions. It shows diphthong contraction, a different spelling of the word for "year," and — most diagnostically — the Yahwistic element in personal names written -yw, where Judah writes -yhw or -yh. This is the dialect of the kingdom Amos and Hosea preached into, in its own administrative hand.

The names themselves are the part readers usually hear about. Of roughly fifty-one distinct personal names in the corpus, about eleven are built on the divine name and about five on Baal, with three built on El and a further twenty-three carrying no divine element at all. Yahwistic and Baal-bearing names sat side by side in one royal bureaucracy. Given 1 Kings 16:31 and the northern kingdom's history, that is worth seeing.

Two Things the Corpus Will Not Tell You

The first is which king. The securely attested regnal years are the ninth, the tenth and the fifteenth — and no others. One damaged sherd, number 63, carries a hieratic numeral that has been read as 12, 14, 16 and 17 by different scholars, which means it cannot be used to narrow the field, and it is why the frequently printed claim that the ostraca date to "years nine, ten, fifteen and seventeen" should not be repeated. Reisner and Lyon in 1910 assigned them to Ahab, on the level at which they were found relative to an alabaster vase of Osorkon II of Egypt; that attribution has been abandoned on pottery, on stratigraphy and on script. The two live options are a single king, in which case Jeroboam II, which C. Rollston calls compelling; or two kings, most often Joash and his son Jeroboam II with the year-15 group belonging to the father, which turns on a possible co-regency. A 2020 handwriting study concluded that the most likely number of writers behind the whole corpus is two, and that the days of Joash and Jeroboam II are the most likely setting. It is not settled, and the fill context means the archaeology cannot settle it.

The second is anything about the religion of the northern kingdom as a whole. This is the point at which a reader is usually handed more than the sherds contain. Fifty-one names from the men who supplied or received wine and oil at one royal court, over about two decades, drawn from clans within a few kilometres, is an elite sample from one place — not a census. The element bʿl can be the divine name, but it can also be the ordinary Hebrew word for lord or owner, and it was sometimes applied to Israel's own God, so a count of Baal names is not a count of Baal worshippers. And Lyon's original move — reading the Baal names as evidence for Ahab's reign because Kings associates Ahab with Baal, while simultaneously using the reign to interpret the names — is circular, and should not be reproduced.

What is left is still substantial. A working northern administration, writing competently in its own dialect, moving wine and oil into a royal storehouse from named estates, in the century Amos walked into to say woe to those who are at ease in Zion and secure on the mountain of Samaria. The ostraca do not confirm a biblical episode. They furnish the room the prophets were shouting in.

Scripture references

• 1 Kings 16:24 — Omri buys the hill of Samaria and builds the city
• 1 Kings 16:31 — Ahab marries Jezebel and serves Baal — the background to the Baal-bearing names
• 2 Kings 14:23 — Jeroboam son of Joash reigns in Samaria forty-one years
• Amos 6:1 — Woe to those secure on the mountain of Samaria — the world these dockets belong to

Sources

• Holding institutionD. G. Lyon, "Hebrew Ostraca from Samaria" — David Gordon Lyon, Harvard University, expressly based on a special report from G. A. Reisner · Harvard Theological Review, 1911. Free worldwide through JSTOR Early Journal Content. The contemporary account by the expedition itselfSupports: The 1909-1910 direction of the dig, the original attribution to Ahab, the first year-readings, and the observation about Baal and Yahwistic names
• ScholarshipS. B. Noegel, "The Samaria Ostraca" — Scott B. Noegel, University of Washington, in M. W. Chavalas (ed.), The Ancient Near East: Historical Sources in Translation (Blackwell, 2006), 396-399 · The author's own copy of the chapterSupports: The 102/63 counts, the two document formats, the reading of ostracon 63 as variously 12, 14, 16 or 17, and the co-regency question
• ScholarshipM. Richelle, "Old and New Readings in the Samaria Ostraca" — Matthieu Richelle · BABELAO 10-11 (2022), 379-413. Open access. A re-edition of the whole Reisner corpus with a full table of the personal namesSupports: The count of distinct personal names and their classification, and the statement that only years 9, 10 and 15 are securely attested
• ScholarshipS. Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., algorithmic handwriting analysis of the Samaria ostraca — Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin and colleagues, Tel Aviv University · PLOS ONE 15/1 (2020), e0227452. Open accessSupports: The finding that two writers are most likely, and the narrowing of candidate kings to Joash and Jeroboam II
• ReferenceM. Suriano, "The Samaria Ostraca" — Matthew J. Suriano, University of Maryland, for Bible Odyssey (Society of Biblical Literature) · 20 June 2017Supports: The single-king versus co-regency alternatives and the northern -yw spelling of the divine element
• Holding institutionHarvard Expedition to Samaria, 1908-1910 — Harvard Library · Cited via the Internet Archive because the live page refuses automated requests. Confirms that Harvard designated Reisner to direct the expedition and records the 1924 Reisner, Fisher and Lyon publicationSupports: The direction of the expedition and its final publication

Further reading

• M. Suriano, "The Samaria Ostraca" (Bible Odyssey, Society of Biblical Literature)
• M. Richelle, "Old and New Readings in the Samaria Ostraca"

Reflect

These sherds are somebody's discarded delivery notes, swept into a builder's fill. What in your ordinary week would tell the truth about you if it were all that survived?