A Shipment of Oil

Ostraca (pieces of broken pottery) were used for writing information that was needed for only a short time, such as letters and delivery dockets for shipments of commodities. The largest group of ostraca are from Samaria, the capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. More than one hundred ostraca were found that date from the first quarter of the eighth century BCE. The texts refer to jars of wine and olive oil and include a date (the regnal year of an unnamed king), a person’s name with the polyvalent prefix le-, and the town from which the jars were sent. In addition, some identify the contents of the jar, and others add the name of the clan district in which the town is located and one or more other names, which may be those of the senders. If the prefix le- means “to,” then the ostraca may be records of shipments by rural estate managers to their owners who were serving as officials in the capital. If it means “belonging to,” the ostraca are probably records of commodities sent by farmers to the king as tax payments. The ostraca were found in a building next to the royal palace, and because some of them were fragments from the same broken jar, it is likely that they were all written there, to serve as records of incoming shipments; the information may have been based on bullas (small lumps of clay stamped with seal impressions) that accompanied the jars, much like the “fiscal bullas” translated below, and was presumably later transferred to a ledger. Some of the names on the ostraca contain forms of God’s name (YHWH), and others contain baal, the name of a Canaanite deity, which might indicate that the individuals bearing those names were the sons of Baal worshipers. But because the basic meaning of baal is “lord,” it could also refer to YHWH, as it does in names such as Bealiah (Baaliyah), meaning “YH(WH) is my Lord,” in 1 Chronicles 12:6.