Just a note to begin: an ostracon (plural: ostraca) is a piece of broken pottery or earthenware that was used in the distant past as a casual writing surface… think of it as the scrap paper or Post-It® Note of the ancient world. Archaeologists have discovered over 180 ostraca from various historical periods at Arad in southern Judah. Among these was a cache of 91 Hebrew ostraca found that were found in the citadel of Arad and dating to around 600 BC or earlier. This places the time of their writing before the time of the Babylonian destruction of the city.
These Hebrew ostraca, most written with black carbon ink on sherds of pottery, pertain to military operations, including letters about supplying the military at the fortress with wine, flour, and oil, or messages about the movement of troops.
(Interesting Side Note: Recent state-of-the-art analysis, including multispectral imaging, revealed the presence of additional writing on the back of Ostracon 16 from this cache. This offers a tantalizing glimpse of how more information might be recoverable from these ancient artifacts.)
Many of these letters were written to Eliashib son of Eshiyahu, who seems to have been the quartermaster or commander at the fortress of Arad. Three bullae (remnants of signature seals made of clay) were also found at Arad, which carried the authentication phrase “belonging to Eliashib son of Eshiyahu” impressed in Hebrew script. Archaeologists noted that the room in which these bullae were found, in the south side of the fortress, was designated the “house of Eliashib.” It is important to note the specificity of the timing of these artifacts: the Hebrew ostraca found in the Arad cache date from the 10th to the 6th centuries BC, but the Eliashib ostraca are from a very small window of time.
One of the letters to Eliashib contains a cryptic comment almost as if written as a coded message about a mysterious matter and the sender ends by stating that all is well because an unnamed man “is in the house of Yahweh” (a phrase meaning the Jerusalem temple). The context of the letter suggests that this unknown man was seeking refuge in the temple and was now safe.
Summary
The ostraca in the Arad cache, and this last letter in particular, are both important and illuminating from a historical perspective. Since this ostracon to Eliashib was written before the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II in 587 BC, the phrase “house of Yahweh” must be referring to the temple that Solomon, son of King David, had originally built in Jerusalem. That makes the Eliashib ostracon the oldest surviving artifact we have discovered so far that provides contemporary evidence for the existence of the temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem.
