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The Samaria Ostraca and the Administration of the Kingdom of Israel

Transmission 27 min read By Guardians of the Sacred Text
Hand-painted woodcut illustration in the site style of two Israelite scribes sitting on the steps of a pale stone colonnade on the hill of Samaria recording a delivery of wine, sealed jars in a row behind them and a donkey waiting at the left.

On the summit of a steep, isolated hill in the central highlands of Palestine stood Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel for some one hundred and fifty years. In 1910 an expedition from Harvard University excavating the royal acropolis there recovered a group of potsherds bearing short texts written in ink. These are the Samaria ostraca. They are modest documents, each only a few lines long, recording deliveries of wine and oil to the capital, but they form the largest body of administrative writing that survives from the kingdom of Israel and one of the earliest substantial groups of Hebrew texts of any kind.123

Their importance for the history of the Bible lies less in what they say than in what they reveal incidentally. They preserve the names of clans known from the genealogies of the tribe of Manasseh, the names of villages in the hill country around Samaria, and the personal names of men who lived in the kingdom during the period of the prophets Amos and Hosea. They show the northern dialect of Hebrew, which differed in small but measurable ways from the Hebrew of Judah. They document the use of writing in the royal administration of Israel at a time from which very little other written evidence survives, and they have recently been studied with computational methods that bear on the question of how widely writing was practised in the kingdom.456

This article describes the city and its excavation, the discovery and the character of the ostraca, the formulae in which they are written, the problem of their date, the information they provide about geography, names, religion and language, and the long-running debate over what kind of transaction they record.

At a glance

  • Site: The royal acropolis of Samaria, capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, in the hills of central Palestine north-west of Shechem.
  • Discovery: 1910, by the Harvard University expedition directed by George Andrew Reisner, in fills associated with a building later called the Ostraca House.
  • Number: Over one hundred inscribed sherds were recovered; somewhat more than sixty are legible enough to be read with confidence.
  • Date: Early eighth century BCE; the texts are dated by regnal years 9, 10 and 15 of an unnamed king, most often identified with Joash or Jeroboam II.
  • Content: Short dockets recording deliveries of wine and oil, with year, personal names, clan or district names and place names.
  • Language: Hebrew in its northern, Israelite form, written in ink in the Old Hebrew script.
  • Significance: The largest body of administrative texts from the kingdom of Israel, and evidence for its geography, personal names, religion and bureaucracy.

Samaria, Capital of Israel

According to the Book of Kings, the city of Samaria was founded by Omri, king of Israel in the early ninth century BCE, who bought the hill from a man named Shemer for two talents of silver, fortified it and named it after its former owner (1 Kings 16:24). Omri had previously ruled from Tirzah, and the move to a new site, unencumbered by older traditions and well placed for communication with the coast and with Phoenicia, gave the dynasty a capital of its own making. Under Omri and his son Ahab the city became the seat of a powerful kingdom that is mentioned in Assyrian royal inscriptions and on the Moabite stone of Mesha.78

The kingdom passed through several dynasties. Jehu, who overthrew the house of Omri in the middle of the ninth century, continued to rule from Samaria, and his descendants held the throne for about a century. The reign of his great-grandson Jeroboam II, in the first half of the eighth century, is generally regarded as a period of territorial expansion and economic prosperity, and it is against this background that the prophets Amos and Hosea condemned the luxury of the capital and the injustice of its ruling class. After the death of Jeroboam II the kingdom fell into instability; kings such as Menahem paid tribute to Assyria, and in 722 or 720 BCE Samaria was taken by the Assyrians after a siege and its territory annexed as a province.910

Excavation has shown that the summit of the hill was levelled and enclosed to form a royal compound, built with finely dressed ashlar masonry of a quality rarely matched in the Iron Age Levant. Within it stood a palace and associated buildings, storerooms and courtyards. The prophetic denunciation of “houses of ivory” (Amos 3:15) has often been connected with the large collection of carved ivory plaques, mostly fragments of furniture inlay in a Phoenician style, recovered from the acropolis by a later expedition.1112

The Harvard Excavations

The first large-scale excavation of Samaria was undertaken by Harvard University between 1908 and 1910, funded by the banker Jacob Schiff. The work was directed in its decisive season by George Andrew Reisner, an Egyptologist who brought to Palestine the methods of careful recording he had developed in Egypt and Nubia, with the architect Clarence Stanley Fisher and with David Gordon Lyon of Harvard. The expedition exposed large parts of the royal acropolis, including the Israelite palace walls and later Hellenistic and Roman structures, and its excavation was among the first in the region to pay systematic attention to stratification.1314

The final publication, Harvard Excavations at Samaria, 1908–1910, appeared in two volumes in 1924, after a long delay caused partly by the First World War. It included the editio princeps of the ostraca, prepared by Lyon and Reisner, with drawings and photographs. For several decades this publication remained the basic source for the texts, and many of the readings it proposed are still accepted.15

Between 1931 and 1935 a second, joint expedition, involving Harvard, the Palestine Exploration Fund, the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the Hebrew University, worked on the site under the direction of John Winter Crowfoot, with Kathleen Kenyon responsible for much of the stratigraphic work. This expedition found the ivories and refined the chronology of the Israelite buildings, and it also recovered a small number of further inscribed sherds. The interpretation of the stratigraphy of the acropolis has remained contested, and it bears directly on the date of the ostraca.1617

The Discovery of the Ostraca

The ostraca were found in 1910 in the western part of the acropolis, in and around a building that came to be called the Ostraca House. Reisner understood them as records belonging to the palace stores. Later study, especially the detailed reassessment of the Harvard records by Ron Tappy, has emphasised that the sherds did not lie on a floor where they had been used, but in layers of fill laid down in connection with construction. They had therefore been discarded and redeposited, and their original place of use cannot be established with certainty.181920

In total, over one hundred inscribed sherds were recovered. Many are faint or fragmentary, and the number that can be read with reasonable confidence is usually given as somewhat more than sixty. They were written in ink with a reed or similar pen on pieces of broken pottery, most of them from jars. The writing is in the Old Hebrew script, the same alphabet used in the Siloam inscription and in the later ostraca of Lachish and Arad, though in an earlier and somewhat different form. The sherds are conventionally numbered according to the sequence of the original publication.212223

The originals were taken, under the arrangements then in force in the Ottoman Empire, to the imperial museum in Constantinople, and they are generally reported to be held in the collections of the Istanbul Archaeology Museums. Modern study has relied on the original photographs, on the published drawings, and on later photography of the sherds themselves.2425

Form and Formulae

The Samaria ostraca are highly standardised. Each records a single delivery and contains a small number of elements arranged in a fixed order. The elements that occur are a date, given as a regnal year; the name of a place or of a clan district; one or more personal names, one of which is regularly introduced by the Hebrew preposition l-, “to” or “belonging to”; and, in some texts, the commodity delivered.2627

A typical text from the tenth year reads, in translation, “In the tenth year. To Shemaryau, from Beer-yam: a jar of old wine.” Others record “a jar of refined oil”. The phrase translated “old wine” has been understood as wine that had been allowed to mature, and the oil designation as oil of a fine, washed or purified grade, the most valuable kind. Year-fifteen texts are usually shorter, giving the year, the clan district, a place name and personal names, and omitting the commodity.282930

The analysis of the formulae has shown that the texts fall into two broad groups. Those dated to the ninth and tenth years generally name the commodity but not the clan, while those dated to the fifteenth year name the clan but not the commodity. The year was written out in words in some texts and expressed with numerical signs derived from Egyptian hieratic in others, a practice also known from the later Judahite ostraca. The authors of the 2020 handwriting study counted nine inscriptions bearing the ninth year, fourteen the tenth and twenty-nine the fifteenth.313233

The regularity of the formulae suggests that the texts were produced within an established administrative routine, in which the recording of incoming goods followed conventions known to those who wrote and used them. Since the texts are very short and contain no verbs, their interpretation depends largely on the meaning assigned to the preposition l- and on the relation between the persons it introduces and the places from which the goods came.3435

The Problem of Date

None of the ostraca names a king. The regnal years must therefore be attributed to a ruler on other grounds, and the question has been debated since the first publication. The highest year mentioned is the fifteenth, which requires a king who reigned at least fifteen years. According to the biblical chronology, correlated with Assyrian records, the kings of Israel who reigned that long were Ahab, Jehu, Jehoahaz, Joash and Jeroboam II.363738

Reisner originally attributed the ostraca to the reign of Ahab, connecting them with the building of the palace. The development of Hebrew palaeography and the reassessment of the stratigraphy led most later scholars to place them in the first half of the eighth century. The forms of the letters are later than those of the Mesha stele and earlier than those of the Siloam inscription, which belongs to the end of the eighth century. On this basis the reigns of Joash and Jeroboam II have become the most commonly favoured.39404142

Within this range opinions differ. Some scholars have assigned all the ostraca to Jeroboam II, whose long and prosperous reign seems an appropriate setting for a well-organised flow of goods to the capital. Others have attributed the year-nine and year-ten ostraca to one king and the year-fifteen ostraca to another, explaining the difference in formulae as a change of reign. Anson Rainey proposed that the dates could be harmonised by assuming a co-regency between Joash and Jeroboam II, in which case the texts might belong to a single calendar year counted in two ways. The authors of the 2020 study observed that, since the latest year attested is the fifteenth, the reign of Joash, who ruled for about sixteen years, is a serious possibility, while the prosperity of the kingdom favours Jeroboam II.4344

The stratigraphic evidence does not settle the question. Because the ostraca came from fills, the date of the fills gives only the latest point by which they had been discarded. The detailed reconstruction of the Harvard excavation records has shown how complicated the deposits were, and the debate over the phases of the royal acropolis continues. A date in the first half of the eighth century BCE, in the generation before the decline of the kingdom, is nevertheless widely accepted.4546

The Clans of Manasseh

One of the most striking features of the year-fifteen ostraca is that they name clans. Several of these names correspond to the descendants of Manasseh listed in the Bible. According to Joshua 17:2–3 and Numbers 26:29–33, the sons of Gilead, son of Machir, son of Manasseh, included Abiezer, Helek, Asriel, Shechem, Shemida and Hepher, and the daughters of Zelophehad, son of Hepher, were Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah. Names corresponding to Abiezer, Helek, Asriel, Shechem, Shemida, Noah and Hoglah appear in the ostraca.474849

This correspondence has been understood as evidence that the biblical genealogies of Manasseh preserve the names of real social and territorial units in the hill country around Samaria. In the ostraca these names appear to designate districts from which goods were sent, and the place names that accompany them are presumably villages within those districts. The appearance of names known in the Bible as daughters of Zelophehad, alongside those known as sons, has been taken to show that the genealogical form of the biblical lists expresses relations between territories and groups rather than simple family descent.5051

The name Shechem is of particular interest, since it is also the name of the ancient city near Samaria at the foot of Mount Gerizim, and the clan district so named was presumably connected with it. The geographical distribution of the clans, reconstructed from the place names, corresponds broadly to the hill country of Manasseh to the south, west and north of the capital, within a radius of a few tens of kilometres.5253

Places and Geography

The ostraca name about twenty places, among them Beer-yam, Hazeroth, Yazith, Sepher and Qosoh. Some have been identified with modern villages whose Arabic names preserve the ancient ones, though many identifications remain uncertain. Taken together, they indicate that the goods recorded came from the agricultural hinterland of Samaria, a region well suited to olives and vines.5455

This picture accords with what is known of the economy of the central highlands. The slopes around Samaria were terraced for vineyards and olive groves, and oil and wine were the principal products of the region and important objects of trade and tribute. The prophetic texts associate the ruling class of Samaria with wine and with the finest oils (Amos 6:6), and the ostraca record precisely these two commodities, in their better grades.5657

Historical geographers, notably Yohanan Aharoni, used the ostraca to reconstruct the administrative geography of Manasseh, mapping the clans and villages and relating them to the tribal boundaries described in the Book of Joshua. Such reconstructions depend on uncertain identifications, but they have made the ostraca a basic source for the historical geography of the northern kingdom.5859

Personal Names and Religion

The ostraca preserve several dozen personal names, a valuable sample of naming practice in the kingdom of Israel. Many are theophoric, that is, they contain the name of a deity. A large proportion are formed with the divine name of the God of Israel, which appears in the northern form -yw, conventionally vocalised -yau, as in Shemaryau, Gaddiyau and Yedayau. This contrasts with the Judahite form -yhw, -yahu, found in the inscriptions of Judah.606162

A smaller but significant number of names contain the element baʿl, as in Abibaal, Baala and Meribaal. The interpretation of these names is debated. Some scholars have seen them as evidence for the worship of the Canaanite god Baal in the kingdom of Israel, in line with the biblical polemic against Baal in the time of Ahab and later. Others have argued that baʿl, meaning “lord” or “master”, could serve as an epithet of the God of Israel himself, so that such names do not necessarily imply the worship of another deity. In either case, the ratio of names formed with the divine name of Israel to names formed with baʿl is often cited in discussions of the religion of the northern kingdom.6364

The contemporary inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud, a remote station in north-eastern Sinai associated with the kingdom of Israel, mention “YHWH of Samaria”, attesting a local designation of the God of Israel connected with the capital. The ostraca do not use this formula, but the two corpora together provide most of the direct written evidence for the religious vocabulary of the northern kingdom in the eighth century.6566

The Northern Dialect

The ostraca are among the principal sources for the dialect of Hebrew spoken in the northern kingdom. Two features in particular are regularly noted. The word for “wine” is written yn, where Judahite texts and biblical Hebrew have yyn, and the word for “year” is written št, where Judahite Hebrew has šnt. These spellings are generally explained as reflecting a contraction of the diphthong in the word for “wine” and the assimilation of the consonant n in the word for “year” in the northern pronunciation.6768

Such features accord with the view, developed by Gary Rendsburg and others, that the Hebrew of the northern kingdom formed a distinct dialect, some of whose traits can also be detected in biblical texts of northern origin. The ostraca thus provide a fixed point for discussions of dialect variation in the Hebrew Bible, comparable to the evidence of the Judahite inscriptions for the southern form of the language.6970

The orthography of the ostraca, which uses few vowel letters, also forms part of the evidence for the history of Hebrew spelling. Comparison with the Mesha stele, the Siloam inscription and the Judahite ostraca has helped to establish the stages by which vowel letters came to be written within words, a development that is reflected, with later revisions, in the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible.7172

Taxes, Estates or Rations

The central question in the interpretation of the ostraca is the nature of the transactions they record. Since the texts consist only of names, places, dates and commodities, their meaning depends on the relation between the elements. Several interpretations have been proposed.73

Reisner and many early scholars understood the ostraca as receipts for taxes paid in kind to the royal treasury, with the persons introduced by l- as the officials or stewards who received them. Another view, associated particularly with Yigael Yadin, took the persons introduced by l- as the owners of estates who received produce from their holdings in the countryside, possibly royal officials or members of the court supported by revenue from assigned lands. The biblical reference to Saul granting fields and vineyards to his servants (1 Samuel 22:7) and the prophetic criticism of landholding by the elite have been cited in this connection.7475

Anson Rainey developed a related interpretation, according to which the persons named were royal servants entitled to the produce of particular estates, and the ostraca documented the shipment of goods from those estates to their recipients at the capital. Hermann Michael Niemann, in a reassessment published in 2008, emphasised the relationship between the king and the clans, interpreting the deliveries as a form of exchange binding the local kin groups of the hill country to the court. Other studies have proposed that the ostraca recorded supplies for the royal household or rations for officials.7677

None of these interpretations has commanded universal assent. The difficulty is that the documents were written for people who already knew the context and did not need it to be stated. What is clear is that the recording of goods arriving at the capital from named villages and clans was routine, that it followed set formulae, and that it implies a system of obligations connecting the rural population of Manasseh with the royal centre.7879

Handwriting and Scribes

In 2020 a team from Tel Aviv University, led by Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin and including archaeologists, mathematicians and physicists, published an algorithmic analysis of the handwriting of thirty-one Samaria ostraca. The method, developed earlier for the Arad ostraca, reconstructs the individual letters, compares their shapes statistically and estimates the number of hands present in a corpus.8081

The study concluded that the thirty-one ostraca were most likely written by two scribes. Since the texts came from different villages and clans, the authors argued that the scribes were probably working in Samaria rather than in the countryside, recording the goods as they arrived. They found no correlation between the two hands and the year, commodity or clan of the texts, which suggested that the scribes were contemporaries performing similar duties, and that the change of formula between the tenth and the fifteenth years reflected an administrative directive rather than individual habit.82

The authors drew two broader conclusions. First, the existence of a small number of scribes recording deliveries in a standard form indicated a centralised bureaucratic apparatus in the capital. Second, the result implied that the use of writing in the northern kingdom at this stage was limited to a relatively small group of trained professionals. They contrasted this with their conclusions for Judah around 600 BCE, where the Arad ostraca suggested a wider spread of literacy among military and administrative personnel.8384

These results depend on the assumptions and limits of the method, and on the small size and short duration of the corpus. They have nevertheless brought the Samaria ostraca into the wider debate about when the kingdoms of Israel and Judah developed the scribal capacity that the composition of extended literary texts would require.8586

The Ostraca and the Hebrew Bible

The Samaria ostraca contain no literary or religious text, and they do not mention any event or person known from the Bible by name. Their relation to the biblical tradition is indirect but nonetheless substantial. They confirm the existence of an organised royal administration in Samaria, as presupposed in the account of the kingdom in Kings. They show that the clan names of the genealogies of Manasseh were the names of real districts. They document the northern form of the divine name and the northern dialect of Hebrew, which bear on the origin of biblical texts thought to have come from the north, such as parts of Hosea and some traditions preserved in Kings and Judges.878889

The ostraca also illuminate the social world addressed by the prophets of the eighth century. Amos describes the elite of Samaria as those who “drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils” (Amos 6:6), and Hosea speaks of grain, wine and oil as the gifts of the God of Israel that the people attributed to Baal (Hosea 2:8). The ostraca, which record the flow of fine wine and oil from the villages of Manasseh to the capital, offer concrete documentary evidence for the economic arrangements against which such criticisms were directed.9091

Finally, the ostraca belong to the small body of Iron Age Hebrew inscriptions that together trace the history of the script and the language in which the biblical books were first written. With the Gezer calendar and the Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon before them, and the Siloam inscription and the ostraca of Lachish and Arad after them, they mark one stage in the development of Hebrew writing from its early forms to the mature script of the late monarchy.929394

Later Study

After the editio princeps, the ostraca were re-edited and discussed in the principal collections of Hebrew inscriptions, including the work of André Lemaire in 1977, the handbook of Johannes Renz and Wolfgang Röllig, the Yale corpus of Dobbs-Allsopp and his colleagues in 2005, and the collection of Shmuel Ahituv in 2008. Each has refined readings, improved identifications of places and names, and contributed to the debate on date and function.959697

The publication of Ron Tappy’s study of the Ostraca House in 2016 reopened the archaeological questions, and the computational work of the Tel Aviv team added a new kind of evidence. The availability of digital images and datasets has made it possible to re-examine the sherds with techniques unavailable to the original editors. Faint or illegible texts may yet yield further readings, as has happened with other Hebrew ostraca examined by multispectral imaging.9899

Conclusion

The Samaria ostraca are short and repetitive, recording little more than who sent wine or oil, from where and in which year. Yet as the largest surviving administrative archive of the kingdom of Israel, they provide unique evidence for the organisation of the northern capital, the geography and clans of the hill country of Manasseh, the personal names and religious vocabulary of the population, and the dialect of Hebrew spoken in the north. They have been read in the light of the biblical genealogies and the prophecies of Amos and Hosea, and they in turn have shaped the interpretation of those texts. More than a century after their discovery, they continue to be studied with new methods, and they remain a principal witness to the written culture of the kingdom whose capital fell to Assyria in the late eighth century BCE.100101102

Notes

  1. George Andrew Reisner, Clarence Stanley Fisher and David Gordon Lyon, Harvard Excavations at Samaria, 1908–1910, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924). ↩
  2. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, J. J. M. Roberts, C. L. Seow and R. E. Whitaker, Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). ↩
  3. Grokipedia, “Samaria”; Grokipedia, “Kingdom of Israel (Samaria)”. ↩
  4. Shmuel Ahituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008). ↩
  5. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of the Samaria Inscriptions Illuminates Bureaucratic Apparatus in Biblical Israel”, PLOS ONE 15/1 (2020), e0227452. ↩
  6. Gary A. Rendsburg, Diglossia in Ancient Hebrew (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1990); Israel Finkelstein, The Forgotten Kingdom: The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013). ↩
  7. Grokipedia, “Omri”; Grokipedia, “Ahab”. ↩
  8. The Masoretes, “The Mesha Stele and the Moabite Stone”; The Masoretes, “The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon, the Gezer Calendar and the Earliest Hebrew Writing”; The Masoretes, “The Siloam Inscription and Hezekiah’s Tunnel”; The Masoretes, “Hebrew and Aramaic”. ↩
  9. Grokipedia, “Jeroboam II”; Grokipedia, “Jehu”; Grokipedia, “Menahem”. ↩
  10. Grokipedia, “Ivory”; Grokipedia, “Hosea”. ↩
  11. Grokipedia, “Samaria”; Grokipedia, “Kingdom of Israel (Samaria)”. ↩
  12. Grokipedia, “Ivory”; Grokipedia, “Hosea”. ↩
  13. George Andrew Reisner, Clarence Stanley Fisher and David Gordon Lyon, Harvard Excavations at Samaria, 1908–1910, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924). ↩
  14. Grokipedia, “George Andrew Reisner”; Grokipedia, “Kathleen Kenyon”. ↩
  15. George Andrew Reisner, Clarence Stanley Fisher and David Gordon Lyon, Harvard Excavations at Samaria, 1908–1910, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924). ↩
  16. Ron E. Tappy, The Archaeology of the Ostraca House at Israelite Samaria: Epigraphic Discoveries in Complicated Contexts (Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2016). ↩
  17. Grokipedia, “George Andrew Reisner”; Grokipedia, “Kathleen Kenyon”. ↩
  18. George Andrew Reisner, Clarence Stanley Fisher and David Gordon Lyon, Harvard Excavations at Samaria, 1908–1910, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924). ↩
  19. Ron E. Tappy, The Archaeology of the Ostraca House at Israelite Samaria: Epigraphic Discoveries in Complicated Contexts (Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2016). ↩
  20. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of the Samaria Inscriptions Illuminates Bureaucratic Apparatus in Biblical Israel”, PLOS ONE 15/1 (2020), e0227452. ↩
  21. George Andrew Reisner, Clarence Stanley Fisher and David Gordon Lyon, Harvard Excavations at Samaria, 1908–1910, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924). ↩
  22. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, J. J. M. Roberts, C. L. Seow and R. E. Whitaker, Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). ↩
  23. Grokipedia, “Paleo-Hebrew alphabet”; Grokipedia, “Hieratic”; The Masoretes, “The Alphabet”. ↩
  24. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, J. J. M. Roberts, C. L. Seow and R. E. Whitaker, Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). ↩
  25. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of the Samaria Inscriptions Illuminates Bureaucratic Apparatus in Biblical Israel”, PLOS ONE 15/1 (2020), e0227452. ↩
  26. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, J. J. M. Roberts, C. L. Seow and R. E. Whitaker, Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). ↩
  27. Ivan T. Kaufman, “Samaria Ostraca”, in David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 921–926. ↩
  28. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, J. J. M. Roberts, C. L. Seow and R. E. Whitaker, Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). ↩
  29. Shmuel Ahituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008). ↩
  30. Ivan T. Kaufman, “Samaria Ostraca”, in David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 921–926. ↩
  31. Ivan T. Kaufman, “Samaria Ostraca”, in David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 921–926. ↩
  32. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of the Samaria Inscriptions Illuminates Bureaucratic Apparatus in Biblical Israel”, PLOS ONE 15/1 (2020), e0227452. ↩
  33. Grokipedia, “Paleo-Hebrew alphabet”; Grokipedia, “Hieratic”; The Masoretes, “The Alphabet”. ↩
  34. Ivan T. Kaufman, “Samaria Ostraca”, in David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 921–926. ↩
  35. Yigael Yadin, “Recipients or Owners? A Note on the Samaria Ostraca”, Israel Exploration Journal 9 (1959), 184–187. ↩
  36. Anson F. Rainey, “Toward a Precise Date for the Samaria Ostraca”, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 272 (1988), 69–74. ↩
  37. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of the Samaria Inscriptions Illuminates Bureaucratic Apparatus in Biblical Israel”, PLOS ONE 15/1 (2020), e0227452. ↩
  38. Grokipedia, “Jeroboam II”; Grokipedia, “Jehu”; Grokipedia, “Menahem”. ↩
  39. André Lemaire, Inscriptions hébraïques, vol. 1: Les ostraca (Paris: Cerf, 1977). ↩
  40. Ivan T. Kaufman, “Samaria Ostraca”, in David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 921–926. ↩
  41. Grokipedia, “Paleo-Hebrew alphabet”; Grokipedia, “Hieratic”; The Masoretes, “The Alphabet”. ↩
  42. The Masoretes, “The Mesha Stele and the Moabite Stone”; The Masoretes, “The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon, the Gezer Calendar and the Earliest Hebrew Writing”; The Masoretes, “The Siloam Inscription and Hezekiah’s Tunnel”; The Masoretes, “Hebrew and Aramaic”. ↩
  43. Anson F. Rainey, “Toward a Precise Date for the Samaria Ostraca”, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 272 (1988), 69–74. ↩
  44. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of the Samaria Inscriptions Illuminates Bureaucratic Apparatus in Biblical Israel”, PLOS ONE 15/1 (2020), e0227452. ↩
  45. Ron E. Tappy, The Archaeology of the Ostraca House at Israelite Samaria: Epigraphic Discoveries in Complicated Contexts (Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2016). ↩
  46. Gary A. Rendsburg, Diglossia in Ancient Hebrew (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1990); Israel Finkelstein, The Forgotten Kingdom: The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013). ↩
  47. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, J. J. M. Roberts, C. L. Seow and R. E. Whitaker, Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). ↩
  48. Ivan T. Kaufman, “Samaria Ostraca”, in David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 921–926. ↩
  49. Grokipedia, “Shechem”; Grokipedia, “Baal”; Grokipedia, “Yahweh”. ↩
  50. Ivan T. Kaufman, “Samaria Ostraca”, in David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 921–926. ↩
  51. Hermann Michael Niemann, “A New Look at the Samaria Ostraca: The King–Clan Relationship”, Tel Aviv 35 (2008), 249–266. ↩
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  54. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, J. J. M. Roberts, C. L. Seow and R. E. Whitaker, Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). ↩
  55. André Lemaire, Inscriptions hébraïques, vol. 1: Les ostraca (Paris: Cerf, 1977). ↩
  56. Shmuel Ahituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008). ↩
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  60. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, J. J. M. Roberts, C. L. Seow and R. E. Whitaker, Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). ↩
  61. Gary A. Rendsburg, Diglossia in Ancient Hebrew (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1990); Israel Finkelstein, The Forgotten Kingdom: The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013). ↩
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  65. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of the Samaria Inscriptions Illuminates Bureaucratic Apparatus in Biblical Israel”, PLOS ONE 15/1 (2020), e0227452. ↩
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  68. Gary A. Rendsburg, Diglossia in Ancient Hebrew (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1990); Israel Finkelstein, The Forgotten Kingdom: The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013). ↩
  69. Gary A. Rendsburg, Diglossia in Ancient Hebrew (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1990); Israel Finkelstein, The Forgotten Kingdom: The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013). ↩
  70. The Masoretes, “The Mesha Stele and the Moabite Stone”; The Masoretes, “The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon, the Gezer Calendar and the Earliest Hebrew Writing”; The Masoretes, “The Siloam Inscription and Hezekiah’s Tunnel”; The Masoretes, “Hebrew and Aramaic”. ↩
  71. Grokipedia, “Paleo-Hebrew alphabet”; Grokipedia, “Hieratic”; The Masoretes, “The Alphabet”. ↩
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  73. Ivan T. Kaufman, “Samaria Ostraca”, in David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 921–926. ↩
  74. Yigael Yadin, “Recipients or Owners? A Note on the Samaria Ostraca”, Israel Exploration Journal 9 (1959), 184–187. ↩
  75. Hermann Michael Niemann, “A New Look at the Samaria Ostraca: The King–Clan Relationship”, Tel Aviv 35 (2008), 249–266. ↩
  76. Anson F. Rainey, “Toward a Precise Date for the Samaria Ostraca”, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 272 (1988), 69–74. ↩
  77. Hermann Michael Niemann, “A New Look at the Samaria Ostraca: The King–Clan Relationship”, Tel Aviv 35 (2008), 249–266. ↩
  78. Ivan T. Kaufman, “Samaria Ostraca”, in David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 921–926. ↩
  79. Hermann Michael Niemann, “A New Look at the Samaria Ostraca: The King–Clan Relationship”, Tel Aviv 35 (2008), 249–266. ↩
  80. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of the Samaria Inscriptions Illuminates Bureaucratic Apparatus in Biblical Israel”, PLOS ONE 15/1 (2020), e0227452. ↩
  81. The Masoretes, “The Arad Ostraca and the Archive of Eliashib”; The Masoretes, “The Lachish Letters and the Last Days of Judah”. ↩
  82. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of the Samaria Inscriptions Illuminates Bureaucratic Apparatus in Biblical Israel”, PLOS ONE 15/1 (2020), e0227452. ↩
  83. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of the Samaria Inscriptions Illuminates Bureaucratic Apparatus in Biblical Israel”, PLOS ONE 15/1 (2020), e0227452. ↩
  84. The Masoretes, “The Arad Ostraca and the Archive of Eliashib”; The Masoretes, “The Lachish Letters and the Last Days of Judah”. ↩
  85. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of the Samaria Inscriptions Illuminates Bureaucratic Apparatus in Biblical Israel”, PLOS ONE 15/1 (2020), e0227452. ↩
  86. Gary A. Rendsburg, Diglossia in Ancient Hebrew (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1990); Israel Finkelstein, The Forgotten Kingdom: The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013). ↩
  87. Ivan T. Kaufman, “Samaria Ostraca”, in David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 921–926. ↩
  88. Gary A. Rendsburg, Diglossia in Ancient Hebrew (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1990); Israel Finkelstein, The Forgotten Kingdom: The Archaeology and History of Northern Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013). ↩
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  90. Shmuel Ahituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008). ↩
  91. Grokipedia, “Ivory”; Grokipedia, “Hosea”. ↩
  92. Grokipedia, “Paleo-Hebrew alphabet”; Grokipedia, “Hieratic”; The Masoretes, “The Alphabet”. ↩
  93. The Masoretes, “The Arad Ostraca and the Archive of Eliashib”; The Masoretes, “The Lachish Letters and the Last Days of Judah”. ↩
  94. The Masoretes, “The Mesha Stele and the Moabite Stone”; The Masoretes, “The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon, the Gezer Calendar and the Earliest Hebrew Writing”; The Masoretes, “The Siloam Inscription and Hezekiah’s Tunnel”; The Masoretes, “Hebrew and Aramaic”. ↩
  95. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, J. J. M. Roberts, C. L. Seow and R. E. Whitaker, Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). ↩
  96. Shmuel Ahituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008). ↩
  97. André Lemaire, Inscriptions hébraïques, vol. 1: Les ostraca (Paris: Cerf, 1977). ↩
  98. Ron E. Tappy, The Archaeology of the Ostraca House at Israelite Samaria: Epigraphic Discoveries in Complicated Contexts (Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2016). ↩
  99. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of the Samaria Inscriptions Illuminates Bureaucratic Apparatus in Biblical Israel”, PLOS ONE 15/1 (2020), e0227452. ↩
  100. George Andrew Reisner, Clarence Stanley Fisher and David Gordon Lyon, Harvard Excavations at Samaria, 1908–1910, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924). ↩
  101. Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin et al., “Algorithmic Handwriting Analysis of the Samaria Inscriptions Illuminates Bureaucratic Apparatus in Biblical Israel”, PLOS ONE 15/1 (2020), e0227452. ↩
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