By Alice Mandell and Jeremy Smoak

 

While most of us experience ancient texts from a distance, as museum displays or as reconstructions in archaeological parks, we often forget that reading was also a multi-sensory experience to ancient people, including ancient Israelites and Judeans.

Recent archaeological studies are beginning to shed greater light on the role that the senses play in human experience and religion. They argue that we need to move away from the tendency to treat sight and sound as the “higher senses” and touch, smell, and taste as the “lower senses.” This is why it is helpful to step back and imagine encountering inscriptions in their original settings. James Watts reminds us that ancient Israelite audiences were drawn to texts for their iconic, performative, and visual characteristics. Some inscriptions were installed as decorations or media within ritual spaces both inside and outside lived communities.

The story of the two stone tablets that YHWH gives Moses demonstrates how texts could become monuments around which communities constructed lives and politics. These tablets are hidden away in the ark and yet they play a pivotal role in Israel’s social and religious evolution. Ancient Hebrew texts “spoke” much more than their mere words—they signaled boundaries, access points, power dynamics, and social relations. And, they often communicated nuanced shades of meaning based upon different seasons, different times of day, and different audiences.

One set of inscriptions that illustrates the multi-sensory value of texts is from the tombs at Khirbet el-Qom, located several miles west of Hebron in the southern part of the territory of Judah. During the excavations of the tombs almost forty years ago, William G. Dever discovered several inscriptions written in Old Hebrew script on the walls of each tomb.

Khirbet el-Qom Tomb 1. William G. Dever 1969–1970. Iron Age Epigraphic Material from the Area of Khirbet El-Kôm. Hebrew Union College Annual 40–41: Figure 2.

 

Khirbet el-Qom Tomb 2. Dever Figure 5.

 

He promptly published the inscriptions and they immediately became an important part of the scholarly discussion of the history of the Hebrew language and the history of monotheism. This was because one of the inscriptions contains a reference to the goddess Asherah alongside a reference to the god Yahweh:

Dever Figure 10.

 

1. Uriyahu, the prosperous, his epitaph
2. Blessed be Uriyahu, by Yahweh
3. and from his enemies, by his Asherah, save him.
4. …………………(Written) by Oniyahu

This text blesses the deceased Uriyahu and petitions for Yahweh and Asherah to save him from his enemies. The tomb location suggests that it is a memorial inscription meant to protect Uriyahu in the afterlife. But the placement of this inscriptionraises questions: why were these set inside of tombs? What role did they play within the darkness of that space? Were humans meant to read this inscription or was it written for a different audience? The answers are shrouded in the same darkness that surrounded the inscriptions.

In order to help reconstruct the multi-sensory experience of ancient Hebrew funerary texts, our forthcoming book Inscribing the Spaces of the Dead, adopts a multimodal approach to tomb inscriptions, asking how these writings communicated in ways beyond mere language. We offer a “tour” that demonstrates how human and divine audiences read these texts as part of the architecture of the tomb.

For example, we can imagine a person descending several steps into Tomb 2; their flickering lamp would have cast shadows on the cave walls. Uriyahu’s inscription (el-Qom 2) and the image of an upside-down hand were cut into a chalk pillar in the central chamber of the tomb; this pillar separated two different burial chambers in the tomb complex.

Hand from Tomb 2. Photo by Jeremy Smoak.

 

It is located above and to the right of two small lamp niches carved into the wall, and would have been the first text that visitors saw. The hand and inscription would have emerged from the darkness as a person placed a lamp into a carved niche in the cave wall. An alternating pattern of darkness and light cast by the flickering lamp animated the cursive Hebrew letters of this text.

Most studies have focused upon what the hand might have symbolized and how it relates to the inscription. In the darkness of the tomb, the upside down hand would have been the first image that a person with a lamp would have seen while facing the wall. It functioned first as a sign that led people to look more closely at the pillar; from the hand, they would have noticed the inscriptions carved next to it. This hand on the wall also signaled to visitors that the inscription was an interactive text. This was a text that people were suppose to see and touch.

Another fascinating characteristic of this particular inscription are the appearance of what scholars call “ghost letters.” Several of the words in the inscription exhibit evidence that people traced over certain letters. Visitors to the tomb may have used the practice of “doubling” or “tracing” as a way to activate or invoke the inscription’s content. Intriguingly, the “ghost letters” appear only on the portions of the inscription that contain a petition for the goddess Asherah to save the deceased. Is this evidence that kin who visited the tomb interacted with the text by touching part of it as a ritual of invoking continued blessing for the deceased?

Whether or not they could read the text, a visitor would have anticipated that this text articulated something about the deceased. Those able to read the personal name and blessing would have identified the named person, Uriyahu, as someone buried in this tomb and have known the text called upon the gods Yahweh and Asherah to protect him from intruders and supernatural forces. Throughout, darkness mediated the experience of seeing the name of the deceased, generating thoughts and fears of aging, death, and the unknown.

Reading is a social act, and the space in front of a text may chart social relations. How many people could stand in front of a text at one time? How did the text orchestrate bodily movements? Did the text require a person to look up or down? We can think of the space in front el-Qom 2 as a cue that told people how they were suppose to interact with this inscription.

Here is the interplay of the senses at the most significant level. The floor space in front of the inscription in the antechamber is about 3–4 meters. The length of the antechamber is somewhat larger, measuring between 4–5 meters. The floor immediately below the inscription is crowded by the last flight of steps that lead down into the tomb.

After Dever Figure 8, Plate VIA.

 

Only a few people would be able to stand in front of the inscription at any one time. The darkness and confined space also meant that a person had to stand close to the inscription to see its contents. The space required viewers to become personal with this inscription.

While visitors in front of larger, monumental inscriptions might stand at a distance and look up at their words, these subterranean texts reflected kinship gestures. Movement into the tomb necessarily involved raising hands, holding up lamps, and touching the inscription. Interacting with a text that contained family names, family gods, and the invocation of divine blessings reified social bonds and rendered the tomb a portal where kin could communicate across time and space. It comes as no surprise then that other inscriptions from this site contain the names of deceased persons with their patronymics.

Tomb 1 contains two such inscriptions decorating the lintel and doorway of a burial chamber.

Alice Mandell and Jeremy Smoak, Reading and Writing in the Dark at Khirbet el-Qom The Literacies of Ancient Subterranean Judah, Near Eastern Archaeology 80.3 (2017): Figure 5.

 

One was written with paint on a lintel above the entrance and reads, l‘w….btntnyhw “Belonging to ‘O…the daughter of Nethanyahu.” To the left of this inscription is another inscriptions that reads:

1. l‘wpy.bn
2. ntnyhw
3. hḥdr.hzh

 

1. Belonging to ‘Ophai, the son of
2. Nethanyahu, (is)
3. This tomb-chamber.”

How might we understand the significance of these shorter inscriptions in the darkness of the tomb? More than identifying the deceased, inscribing of family names in this space helped construct a story about families. Inscribed blessings, the names of ancestors, and the names of gods connected the living and the dead. It should come as little surprise that describing blessings, tombs, and the names of the ancestors would become the literary seams of the narratives about Israel’s ancestors in the book of Genesis. But we should remember that these names were not experienced as mere words, but were engaged with the space around them, triggering a host of sensory experiences.

 

Alice Mandell is William Foxwell Albright Chair in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins University.  Jeremy Smoak is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.