INTERPRETING THE QEIYAFA OSTRACON

Brian E. Colless

The Qeiyafa Ostracon is a potsherd, bearing five lines of writing; it was found on the floor of a room in a building at Khirbet Qeiyafa, which is a fortress situated SW of Jerusalem; it looks out over the the Elah Valley ("Vale of the Terebinth") and an ancient road to Philistia. The ostracon  is now housed in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The site has been identified by Yosef Garfinkel as Sha`arayim ("Two Gates", an unusual feature which is present at Qeiyafa);  Sha`arayim is a place mentioned in the account of the confrontation between David and Goliath, as being on the road leading to Gath and Ekron (1 Samuel 17:52).

The history of the discovery of the document (by the expedition led by Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor) is recorded at the Qeiyafa Ostracon Chronicle Part 1; and Part 2 gives an account of the attempts by various scholars to decipher the five lines of faded writing, with two excellent and essential photographs by Clara Amit, and drawings by Haggai Misgav (the official epigraphist of the expedition), Ada Yardeni, Gershon Galil, and Émile Puech. George Grena also provided a copy of his own useful drawing to me personally.

After examining all the available pictures and drawings, and trying numerous possibilities for each of the five lines, and literally joining up the dots to reconstruct the faint letters, I have produced this preliminary sketch of what I see on the sherd (but the one that I eventually publish will not be exactly like this).