cheap alternative to papyrus. Texts on ostraca were not necessarily less
carefully written in terms of grammar or orthography, and they are a good
indication that writing was widespread and even employed for the most
profane purposes.
Often single personal names or lists of names in Hebrew or Aramaic
appear on ostraca (Mur 74-77), sometimes also in Greek (Mur 165-76) or
Latin (Mur 168). The earliest examples come from second-century-b.c.e.
Gezer. The most famous corpus of this kind is the more than 700 shards
from Masada bearing names, single letters, or combinations of letters on
them.
A clearly economic purpose is evident in a list scratched onto the lid of
an ossuary found in 1910 in a tomb at Bethpage. The lists gives twenty-
three names along with sums of money. It is evidently a roster of workers
in an ossuary workshop and indicates their daily wages. It was found only
1.5 kilometers from the large limestone quarries of Hizma.
Other ostraca parallel papyrus documents. One of the most famous
and controversial examples is KhQ 1, the largest of three ostraca found in
1996 atop Roland de Vaux’s excavation dump at Qumran. This Hebrew
ostracon is probably the draft of a deed documenting the sale of an or-
chard by a certain Honi to Eleazar son of Nahmani. The deed was written
in Jericho and is dated to “year two,” which for paleographical reasons
must refer to the First Revolt (67c.e.). Unfortunately, the text is fragmen-
tary. It gained some attention when the first editors read a partial word in
line 8 asyaFadand interpreted the ostracon as another link between the
Qumran settlement and the texts from the caves. This reconstruction has
rightly been rejected by several specialists. An Edomite ostracon from
Maresha dated to summer 176b.c.e.is also documentary in nature and
represents so far the only marriage contract on an ostracon from ancient
Palestine. One of the very few examples of a “narrative” text on an
ostracon from the Hellenistic and Roman periods is Mur 72, which de-
scribes the activities of a certain Yohahan. Unfortunately, the fragmentary
nature of the text provides little information on the context and purpose
of the narrative passage.362
jürgen k. zangenbergEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:04:15 PM