Abstract
Arad is a well preserved desert fort on the southern frontier of the biblical kingdom of Judah. Excavation of the site yielded over 100 Hebrew ostraca (ink inscriptions on potsherds) dated to ca. 600 BCE, the eve of Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem. Due to the site’s isolation, small size and texts that were written in a short time span, the Arad corpus holds important keys to understanding dissemination of literacy in Judah. Here we present the handwriting analysis of 18 Arad inscriptions, including more than 150 pair-wise assessments of writer’s identity. The examination was performed by two new algorithmic handwriting analysis methods and independently by a professional forensic document examiner. To the best of our knowledge, no such large-scale pair-wise assessments of ancient documents by a forensic expert has previously been published. Comparison of forensic examination with algorithmic analysis is also unique. Our study demonstrates substantial agreement between the results of these independent methods of investigation. Remarkably, the forensic examination reveals a high probability of at least 12 writers within the analyzed corpus. This is a major increment over the previously published algorithmic estimations, which revealed 4–7 writers for the same assemblage. The high literacy rate detected within the small Arad stronghold, estimated (using broadly-accepted paleo-demographic coefficients) to have accommodated 20–30 soldiers, demonstrates widespread literacy in the late 7th century BCE Judahite military and administration apparatuses, with the ability to compose biblical texts during this period a possible by-product.
Highlights
The Hebrew inscriptions from the Arad fort [1], located in the arid southern frontier of biblical Judah, is one of a few textual corpora from the First Temple period
Dated to ca. 600 BCE, the more than 100 ostraca provide a record of distribution of provisions to military units shortly before the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by the invading Babylonian army
Some orders of provisions refer to the Kittiyim, seemingly a Greek mercenary unit/s [2], which assisted in protecting the Negev desert border from the neighboring Kingdom of Edom
Summary
The Hebrew inscriptions from the Arad fort [1], located in the arid southern frontier of biblical Judah (see Fig 1), is one of a few textual corpora from the First Temple period. 600 BCE, the more than 100 ostraca (texts written in ink on clay potsherds) provide a record of distribution of provisions to military units shortly before the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by the invading Babylonian army (examples of some Arad ostraca are shown in Fig 2; the ostraca numbers used throughout this work are according to [1]). A vital part of the corpus, the so-called “Eliashib’s letters,” involving the fort quartermaster, probably encompasses the registration of about one month’s expenses [3]. This is true at least for texts 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 16, 17a, 17b and 18 analyzed . The texts provide invaluable information regarding daily life of the Judahite army personnel (e.g., [4,5]), and contribute to the research fields of history of Ancient Israel, Hebrew epigraphy and biblical exegesis
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