The Lachish Letters are a collection of texts excavated at biblical Lachish in southern Israel that date to the years immediately preceding the site’s destruction by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II in the early sixth century BCE, as described in the Book of Jeremiah. Although only a few of the inscriptions remain legible, the information they provide has made them a key to understanding and interpreting historical events surrounding the fall of the Kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE, especially as some may link directly to events recorded in Jeremiah.A nice brief introduction to this important cache of First-Temple-era Hebrew epigraphic texts.[...]
Some PaleoJudaica posts involving the Lachish Letters are here, here, here, and here. A brief, more ancient, inscribed ostracon was discovered at Lachish in 2015. And then there is the embarrassing story of the fake Darius ostracon from earlier this year.
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