PHILOLOGOS writes on the Lachish Letters:

Language of Lachish

Sandra Metzger writes to ask:

"Would you possibly know of an ancient battle that sounds like 'Lekesh' but is spelled differently? I read about it 20 years ago in a book on archaeology and the Bible, which was later stolen in Liverpool, England, when in transport back to America. A hole in my memory prevents me from remembering the spelling to look it up."

Liverpool must have had some very intellectual thieves. In any case, I am glad to be able to restore to Ms. Metzger the name of her lost battle, which was the battle of Lachish, pronounced "Lah-KHEESH.'"

What does this battle have to do with a language column? Quite a lot, actually, because in archaeological excavations conducted in the 1920s and 1930s at Lachish, a hilltop 10 miles west of Hebron near where the mountains of Judea meet the coastal plain, a number of fascinating and dramatic Hebrew ostraca � inscriptions written on shards of broken pottery � from the exact period in which the battle was fought were discovered. Many of these consisted of letters or fragments of them written by a Judean army officer named Hosha'yahu to his commander Ya'ush, who was stationed with his troops in Lachish while awaiting an attack from the forces of the Babylonian king Sennacherib in 701 BCE. They teach us some new Hebrew expressions from biblical times, cause us to rethink some old ones and occasion some reflections about what is and isn't known regarding the language of the Bible.

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All this makes one reflect that, as large and varied a book as the Bible is, its Hebrew represents only a part of the Hebrew spoken in biblical times, about which we need to avoid overly hard-and-fast assumptions. Readers of this column may remember, for instance, how, several months ago, in a discussion of an alleged eighth-century BCE inscription supposedly found on the Temple Mount, I argued that a Hebrew expression occurring in it, and used differently from the way it is used in biblical texts, might be authentic nonetheless. This contention was scoffed at by a number of biblical scholars and the inscription, indeed, has meanwhile been declared counterfeit by the Israel Anitiquities Department; but the example of the Lachish letters shows clearly, I think, that in principle I was right. There are several linguistic usages in these letters that, had suspicion been cast on the ostraca they were written on, could have been taken by the same scholars as proof that these ostraca were fake too.

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This is a good point and needs to be kept in mind. In the case of the "Joash Inscription" (which is the one to which Philologos is referring), the problem was that it drew heavily on the biblical passages relating to the Temple but also mixed in anachronistic usages that were unlikely to be ancient. Epigraphers agreed that the evidence was overwhelmingly in favor of it being a forgery. See the essays of Hurowitz and Ahituv on the Bible and Interpretation website. (These require Hebrew fonts that I don't have, but you can still follow the argument in general without them.)

UPDATE: The earlier Philologos columns that discuss the "Joash Inscription" are here and here. This seems to be a case of using the right arguments to reach the wrong conclusion, which happens to us all sometimes.