...yahu who is Over the House
When I first came to Britain nearly forty years ago one of my first destinations was the British Museum, where I made a bee-line for the famous Assyrian reliefs. I was annoyed on that first visit to find that the Lachish Reliefs were closed - it turned out that the keeper for that particular room was sick that day, so the most important Assyrian remains in the museum were shut down in consequence. (It isn't only in Third World countries that museum managers show a total lack of appreciation for the objects in their care!)
The Egyptian remains upstairs, though interesting, were of lesser interest to someone who had recently seen the "real things" in Egypt, where the collection in the Cairo Museum is unsurpassed. Opening off the Egyptian galleries, however, were a number of smaller rooms whose contents appeared to have been selected at random. An ivory plaque of a lion attacking a negro was mounted in the centre of a room whose walls and display cases were filled with objects from Yemen and Arabia; Babylonian tablets filled the cases in one half of another room while the rest of the room was taken up with pottery from Palestine. Hittite inscriptions jostled for wall space with Persian glazed tiles and Babylonian seals, and so it went on.
To my pleased surprise, in the wall of one of these rooms there was a copy of the Hezekiah's Tunnel inscription and above it two other rectangles of stone, both inscribed, but the inscription on one slab was spoiled by a deep hole cut into the rock. I didn't recognise them, but when I looked more closely at the plaque beside them I felt a shiver run down my spine. It said that the stones had been found in Silwan, just below the City of David, and bore the words, "This is [the sepulchre of ....]yahu, who is over the house. There is neither silver nor gold here, only his bones and those of his slave-girl wife. Cursed be the man who opens this."
Frankly, the words meant nothing to me, but it was the explanatory gloss given by the museum authorities that thrilled me. The gap in the inscription, they suggested, should be filled with the letters "Sheben", giving the Hebrew name "Shebenyahu" or "Shebeniah" - and if this suggestion was correct, then almost certainly the individual whose bones, along with those of his favourite concubine, had lain in the tomb was the Shebna escoriated by the prophet Isaiah.
Thus saith the Lord, "Go, get thee unto this terasurer, even unto Shebna, who is over the house, and say, 'What hast thou here? and Whom hs thou htere? that thou has hewed thee out a sepulchre here, as he that heweth him out a sepulchre on high and that graveth an habitation for himself in a rock?'" Isaiah 22:15
The prophet goes on to predict that the unfortunate Shebna will never lie in his expensive tomb but will be tossed like a ball into a foreign land and his position of treasurer or steward (over the house) will be given to someone more worthy.
Apparently this inscription was discovered in 1870 by the Frenchman Charles Clermont-Ganneau, who excavated a badly damaged tomb high on the cliff opposite Mt Ophel. Although he was not able to read the script, he realised that it had historical as well as monetary value and cut it out of the rock. The successful bidder turned out to be the British Museum, so what I saw wasn't, as I had at first thought, a copy like the Hezekiah's Tunnel inscription, but the genuine article. (That may be why the Shebeniah Inscription is still there but Hezekiah has vanished.)
Surprisingly, the inscription was not read until 1953, when the Israeli scholar Nahman Avigad made sense of the letters, which were almost lost in the weathering of the stone. His reading - and his interpretation of the inscription as a reference to the Biblical Shebna - have not been seriously questioned. The typography of the Hezekiah's Tunnel inscription is so similar that there is no doubt of the date of the Shebna inscription.
However between 1966 and 1968 the Hebrew University in Tel Aviv sponsored excavations at Lachish, directed by Yohanan Aharoni. One of his colleagues, Volkmar Fritz, made an intriguing find as he cleared one of the storerooms in Lachish. The floor of the storeroom was littered with broken pottery which Fritz suggested had been stored on shelves that had collapsed when the storeroom was burned. Scattered among the potsherds were half a dozen stone weights, a single ostracon (pottery sherd with writing on it) and a nearly complete little jug.
As usual, all the pottery was sent off to be washed and as the dirt was emptied out of the jug before it was plunged into the water, seventeen lumps of clay fell out. It's as well that Fritz had sharp eyes; I suspect I would have simply thrown the whole lot away, but Fritz recognised that these lumps of clay were bullae - that is to say, they had been used to seal documents. For some reason, someone had carefully prised the seals away from the papyrus - the impression of the papyrus could still be seen on the back of most of them - and stored them in a jar, presumably to show off his own importance in receiving letters from so many notables!
Not all the bullae were complete, and particularly frustrating was one that bore two lines of writing. One line said "Shebnayahu" and the other said "ha-melekh" or "the king", but there was a bit broken off which probably carried a single word - but was that word "ben" (son) or "ebed" (servant)? Even a single extra letter would give us the answer - 'n' or 'd' - but there is no trace of it.
As archaeological puzzles go, it is not the greatest or most earth-shattering puzzle and I doubt that even Aharoni or Fritz lost a single night's sleep worrying about it. Nevertheless it was with delight that someone trawling through the antiques shops in Jerusalem spotted another bulla that had been stamped with the very same seal. This too bore the two lines saying "Shebnayahu" and "ha-melekh", this too was broken on the right-hand side - but in this case it wasn't quite as broken. A single letter of the missing word had survived and it was a 'd'!
Had it been an 'n' the long-vanished letter would have come from "Shebna, son of the king", a person about whom we have no information whatsoever. As it was a 'd', the letter came from "Shebna, servant of the king", almost certainly the same person as the steward "over the house" whose tomb still overlooks the Kidron Valley and whose ringing denunciation by the prophet Isaiah still sends a tingle down my spine whenever I read it.
© Kendall K. Down 2009
