Dispatch of Food

Early 5th Century BCE

About This Entry

The writer of this letter from the first quarter of the fifth century BCE instructs the recipient to send him bread only in a sealed container, apparently to prevent the bread from becoming ritually impure due to contact with an impure creature or a person who had touched a corpse. He adds that the recipient had previously sent him impure bread.

[Greetings, PN,] from [PN].

[No]w, I [sen]t to you, saying: “Do not dispatch to me bread without it being sealed.”

Lo, all the jars are impure. Behold, the bread which [you]

dispatch[ed] to me yesterday is im[pure].

Now, do not [dispatch] to me [ . . . ] b[read].

Translated by Bezalel Porten.

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Notes

[PN—indicates a personal name. It is used here when the name is illegible or is not preserved.—Eds.]

Credits

Dispatch of Food, in Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni, eds., Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt, trans. Bezalel Porten (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1999), D7.44, p. 185. Used with permission of Bezalel Porten.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 1.