The Ophel pithos is a 3,000-year-old inscription on a fragment of a ceramic jar found near
Jerusalem
Jerusalem (; he, יְרוּשָׁלַיִם ; ar, القُدس ) (combining the Biblical and common usage Arabic names); grc, Ἱερουσαλήμ/Ἰεροσόλυμα, Hierousalḗm/Hierosóluma; hy, Երուսաղեմ, Erusałēm. i ...
's
Temple Mount
The Temple Mount ( hbo, הַר הַבַּיִת, translit=Har haBayīt, label=Hebrew, lit=Mount of the House f the Holy}), also known as al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf (Arabic: الحرم الشريف, lit. 'The Noble Sanctuary'), al-Aqsa Mosque compou ...
by
Israel
Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...
i archeologist
Eilat Mazar
Eilat Mazar ( he, אילת מזר; 10 September 195625 May 2021) was an Israeli archaeologist. She specialized in Jerusalem and Phoenician archaeology. She was also a key person in Biblical archaeology noted for her discovery of the Large Ston ...
.
Discovery
The
Ophel
''Ophel'' ( he, עֹ֫פֶל ''‘ōp̄el''), also Graecised to ''ophlas'', is the biblical term given to a certain part of a settlement or city that is elevated from its surroundings, and probably means fortified hill or risen area. In the Hebr ...
NBC News
NBC News is the news division of the American broadcast television network NBC. The division operates under NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, a division of NBCUniversal, which is, in turn, a subsidiary of Comcast. The news division's var ...
July 10, 2013 Eilat Mazar has dated the potsherds on which the inscription was written to the 10th century BCE. The interpretation of the fragment is controversial, with readings varying from sensationalist claims to minimalist scepticism.
The fragment comes from a pithos, a large neckless ceramic jar,Nir Hasson Israeli archaeologists dig up artifact from time of Kings David and Solomon at Haaretz, July 15, 2013. discovered in a ceramic assemblage together with 6 other large storage jars that together comprised a fill that was employed to reinforce the earth under the second floor of a building. The archaeologists excavating the site identified it as contemporary with the biblical period of
David
David (; , "beloved one") (traditional spelling), , ''Dāwūd''; grc-koi, Δαυΐδ, Dauíd; la, Davidus, David; gez , ዳዊት, ''Dawit''; xcl, Դաւիթ, ''Dawitʿ''; cu, Давíдъ, ''Davidŭ''; possibly meaning "beloved one". w ...
and Solomon, and dated to the 10th century BCE. According to Shmuel Ahituv of
Ben-Gurion University
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) ( he, אוניברסיטת בן-גוריון בנגב, ''Universitat Ben-Guriyon baNegev'') is a public research university in Beersheba, Israel. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has five campuses: the ...
, the inscription wound about the jar's shoulder, yielding the end of the inscription and one letter of its beginning.Christopher Rollsto The Decipherment of the New ‘Incised Jerusalem Pithos’
Experts identified the writing as an example of linear alphabetic
Northwest Semitic
Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic languages comprising the indigenous languages of the Levant. It emerged from Proto-Semitic in the Early Bronze Age. It is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite in the Middle Bronze A ...
Thus transliterated, this combination yields no comprehensible meaning within any known West Semitic language. The archaeologists surmised that, since it was not written in Hebrew, the text might refer to the name of a Jebusite, the population inhabiting Jerusalem before the kingdom of David was established.
Christopher Rollston
Prof. Christopher A. Rollston (born in Michigan, United States) is a scholar of the ancient Near East, specializing in Hebrew Bible, Greek New Testament, Old Testament Apocrypha, Northwest Semitic literature, epigraphy and paleography.
Biogr ...
agreed with Ahituv's reading, in the face of some scholars who argue that the script was Phoenician. Rollston notes that in this period, the direction of writing in Northwest Semitic and Phoenician was standardized as sinistrograde (right to left), whereas the incised text is typical of Early Alphabetic, i.e., dextrograde (left to right) script. Rollston would date the text to the 11th century, which is on the early end of Ahituv's 11th–10th-century dating.
Rollston's transcription,
Semitic root
The roots of verbs and most nouns in the Semitic languages are characterized as a sequence of consonants or "radicals" (hence the term consonantal root). Such abstract consonantal roots are used in the formation of actual words by adding the vowels ...
lamed
Lamedh or Lamed is the twelfth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Hebrew Lāmed , Aramaic Lāmadh , Syriac Lāmaḏ ܠ, Arabic , and Phoenician Lāmed . Its sound value is .
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Lambda (Λ), Latin ...
, het, meaning 'pot, cauldron'. He also conjectures that the succeeding
nun
A nun is a woman who vows to dedicate her life to religious service, typically living under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience in the enclosure of a monastery or convent.''The Oxford English Dictionary'', vol. X, page 599. The term is o ...
might be followed not by L, but R, resh, suggesting a name attested in the
Tanakh
The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach" '' Abner ben Ner, the commander of Saul's army.Gershon Galil, to the contrary, takes the view that the text is Hebrew and should be dated to the second half of the 10th century BCE, considering that it reads sinistrograde, from right to left, and reportedly provides two alternative readings:
yielding the meaning 'spoiled wine from…'.
Galil's preferred reading (b) takes the initial ''m'' as the final letter in a regnal year formula, ''esrim'' (twenty) or ''shloshim'' (thirty); the double yod in ''yayin'' 'wine' as a clue to its southern Hebrew character, while ''halak'' would be a definition, typical of
Ugarit
)
, image =Ugarit Corbel.jpg
, image_size=300
, alt =
, caption = Entrance to the Royal Palace of Ugarit
, map_type = Near East#Syria
, map_alt =
, map_size = 300
, relief=yes
, location = Latakia Governorate, Syria
, region = ...
's oenological classification, referring to the lowest quality wine. The implication would be that the jar contained poor wine used for the king's conscripted labouring class.
Douglas Petrovich agrees with Galil that the inscription is Hebrew, should be read sinistrograde, and that the remnant strokes only can be restored to yod-yod, as no other restoration is plausible. The main difference in his view is that he reads the initial visible letter (from the right) as a nun, rather than a mem. He also agrees that the inscription was written as a year-date/labeling formula for a commercial product (wine, in this case), as exemplified by the jar-handle inscriptions from Gibeon of the 7th century BCE, though he considers that the inscription likely reads, ' n the firs (regnal) year: pseudo- in from he garden of ??. He suggests that the pithos was created during Solomon's Year 1 since David did not control Jerusalem in his Year 1, and the reign of Rehoboam is probably too late for the archaeological context of the pottery assemblage.
A methodologically different approach was chosen by Lehmann & Zernecke from the Research Unit on ancient Hebrew & Epigraphy of Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany.R.G.Lehmann & A.E.Zernecke Bemerkungen und Beobachtungen zu der neuen Ophel-Pithosinschrift in: Reinhard G. Lehmann und Anna Elise Zernecke (eds.), ''Schrift und Sprache''. Papers read at the 10th Mainz International Colloquium on Ancient Hebrew (MICAH), Mainz, 28–30 October 2011 (KUSATU 15 / 2013), Waltrop: Spenner 2013, p. 437-450. See als a new drawing To avoid any presupposition and because the sherd has no decisive diagnostic lexeme that could give a hint about the language it is written in, Lehmann & Zernecke decided to analyse the script only with regard to the writing process itself and to reconstruct the broken letters on a strictly comparative palaeographic base alone.
They suggest a reading either M-Q-P-Ḥ-N-M-Ṣ-N or N-Ṣ-M-N-Ḥ-P-Q-M, depending on the writing direction. This can not be set without a decisive clue about the language, which in Jerusalem at that time would not be restricted to only Hebrew.
Archaeology of Israel
The archaeology of Israel is the study of the archaeology of the present-day Israel, stretching from prehistory through three millennia of documented history. The ancient Land of Israel was a geographical bridge between the political and cultu ...
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Biblical archaeology (excavations and artifacts)
Biblical archaeology is an academic school and a subset of Biblical studies and Levantine archaeology. Biblical archaeology studies archaeological sites from the Ancient Near East and especially the Holy Land (also known as Palestine, Land ...
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Chronology of the Bible
The chronology of the Bible is an elaborate system of lifespans, 'generations', and other means by which the Masoretic Hebrew Bible (the text of the Bible most commonly in use today) measures the passage of events from the creation to around 164 ...
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Cities of the Ancient Near East
The earliest cities in history were in the ancient Near East, an area covering roughly that of the modern Middle East: its history began in the 4th millennium BC and ended, depending on the interpretation of the term, either with the conquest by ...