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October 14, 2005

When There is But Little, Every Little Bit Helps

Jim Davila at PaleoJudaica has a post that includes a small note on the significance of the inscribed bulla fragment I discussed a couple of times the other day. He is responding to this comment from Archaeologist Meir Ben-Dov in a recent Ha'aretz article.

Let's say that there is a bulla and it has three letters on it. Yigal Shiloh [excavator of the City of David] had 70 intact bullas. This bulla says nothing. There is no discovery, so why blow things up like this?

Here is what Davila says,

Well, it has more than three letters (see the article for details) but that's not the point. Genuine ancient Hebrew inscriptions -- even poorly preserved ones -- are very hard to come by and each one adds a bit to the corpus and is of cumulative importance. As I've noted before (see second link above), for an archaeologist Dr. Ben Dov (if he's been quoted correctly) expresses a surprisingly casual attitude toward the recovery of ancient artifacts.

And Davila is absolutely correct.

It is true that the bulla is out of context, so we will never know for sure where it came from. Archaeologist Gabi Barkai, who is sifting the debris from the Waqf construction project, acknowledges the possibility that the earth he is sifting might be mixed with earth from somewhere other than the Temple Mount. This does, of course, reduce what can be learned from the bulla but to say, "This bulla says nothing. There is no discovery," is simply wrong. And it would be wrong even if the bulla did only contained three letters. Actually, it contains three short lines of which three letters, the theophoric element יהו, yahu, have been made public. See my previous posts.

Posted by Duane Smith at October 14, 2005 6:53 PM | Read more on Archaeology |

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