Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions: Volume 1

Book excerpt: The inscriptions dealt with in this book come from the Old Testament period (c. 1000 BC to c. 200 BCE) and constitute an important additional source for our knowledge of the Hebrew language and the religion, history and customs of ancient Israel. The corpus includes texts like the Lachish and Arad letters, the Siloam tunnel inscription, the recently discovered religious texts from Kuntillet Ajerud, and the hundreds of seals, seal-impressions and weights that are now known. Each text is given a unique reference number according to a specially devised system, with an indication of its date and place of origin (where these are known) and one or more bibliographical references. It covers all complete words in the texts (including prepositions and names of persons and places), and also the Egyptian hieratic numerals and other symbols that were used in them.