Who Weakens the Hands: On a Gap in the Sixth Lachish Letter

by Harry Torczyner, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The sixth letter from Lachish is a piece of a broken jar with fifteen lines of ink on it. The ink is faded and in places it is only a stain. In the fifth line there is a gap. A word stood there once, a word of a few letters, and it is no longer there to be read. In 1938 I put a word into the gap and printed it inside square brackets, and the brackets were honest. What I did inside them is the subject of this essay.

I put the prophet there. Other men, reading the same sherd, put the princes there, meaning the officials of the king. Both readings fit the space and both make a sentence. Only one of them can be what the scribe wrote. Between the two lies the whole question of what it means to read a damaged text, and I come out of it less well than I would like.

I. What can be read

Begin with what is not in dispute, or not much. The letter is from Hoshaiah, who commanded an outpost somewhere in the Shephelah, to Yaosh, who commanded at Lachish. It opens with the formula of the whole correspondence: may the Lord cause my lord to see this season in peace. Then comes the sentence that tells us what kind of man Hoshaiah was: Who is your servant, a dog, that my lord has sent him the letter of the king and the letters of the … — here, too, the word is damaged — saying, Read them.

So Yaosh had forwarded to his subordinate a packet of correspondence from Jerusalem: a letter from the king, and other letters from persons whose title has been lost. He had told Hoshaiah to read them. Hoshaiah read them, and he did not like what he read. Behold, he writes, the words of the [—] are not good, to weaken your hands and to slacken the hands of the men. Towards the end of the letter, as I read it, he says that since he read the letters there has been no peace for him.

That is the shape of it. A field officer is shown documents from the capital, and he writes back to his commander, as directly as a man who calls himself a dog may write, that these documents are bad for morale. The words that are bad for morale belong to someone. The gap is that someone.

II. The same words in another witness

Every reader of the Hebrew Bible who saw that sentence in 1938 heard an echo, and so did I. In the thirty-eighth chapter of Jeremiah the princes of Judah, the sarim, go to King Zedekiah about the prophet. They want him dead. Their reason is given in a single line:

וַיֹּאמְרוּ הַשָּׂרִים אֶל־הַמֶּלֶךְ יוּמַת נָא אֶת־הָאִישׁ הַזֶּה כִּי־עַל־כֵּן הוּא־מְרַפֵּא אֶת־יְדֵי אַנְשֵׁי הַמִּלְחָמָה

Then the princes said unto the king: Let this man, we pray thee, be put to death; forasmuch as he weakeneth the hands of the men of war that remain in this city. (Jeremiah 38:4)

To weaken the hands of the men. The ostracon and the book use the same idiom about the same war. Lachish and Azekah, the book says in another place (Jeremiah 34:7), were the last fortified cities of Judah still standing against the king of Babylon. The ostraca were found in the burnt gate of Lachish. They are not a later retelling of that siege. They were written in its last months, not long before the fire that baked them hard enough to last.

I want to be precise about what this parallel proves, because it proves something real. It proves that weakening the hands was not a literary figure invented by a scribe writing up Jeremiah's life afterwards at a desk. It was the working vocabulary of the Judean officer class in the last year of the kingdom. A commander at a hill outpost reached for it in a dispatch, without ornament, because it was the phrase men used for this offence. When the princes in Jeremiah 38 say it, they are not speaking the language of a later editor. They are speaking the language of the guardroom. The sherd is the witness that the book's dialogue has the true sound of the time.

There is also a small matter of spelling. In the Masoretic text the participle in Jeremiah 38:4 is written מְרַפֵּא, with a final aleph, as though the verb came from רָפָא, to heal. It does not. The verb is רָפָה, to sink, to slacken, to let fall: hands that are slack are hands that drop the sword. The two roots were confused in writing often enough in the later language, and the Masoretes preserved the spelling they received, as they should have done. The ostracon, as I read it, writes the infinitive lerappot with the root's own letters. The living language spells the word as the verb it is. The transmitted text spells it as a later scribe heard it. This is a small thing, and I give it only as an example of what I have argued all my life: the inscription is not an illustration added to the Bible. It is the older witness, and in matters of the language it often has the better reading.

So far I stand by everything I wrote. The trouble is in the brackets.

III. What I wanted

I will say plainly what I wanted, because a reader who does not know what he wants cannot guard against it.

I wanted the ostraca to speak of prophets. I wanted a second witness, independent of the book of Jeremiah and not passed through any scribe's hands, to the struggle between the prophetic party and the military party in the last days of Judah. And the third letter had given me a prophet whom no one can take away. Near its end Hoshaiah reports the letter of Tobiah, the servant of the king, which came to Shallum son of Jaddua from the prophet, saying, Beware. The word hannavi, the prophet, stands there clearly. D. Winton Thomas, who went through every one of my prophets in the ostraca with great courtesy and no mercy in a lecture delivered in January 1946, kept that one. He kept it because the letters are there to be seen.

The same third letter says something else that seemed to me to open a door. The commander of the army, Coniah son of Elnathan, has gone down to go to Egypt. Every student of Jeremiah knows another Elnathan who went down to Egypt. In the twenty-sixth chapter a prophet named Uriah son of Shemaiah, of Kiriath-jearim, prophesies against the city according to all the words of Jeremiah. King Jehoiakim seeks to kill him. Uriah flees to Egypt. And Jehoiakim the king sent men into Egypt, Elnathan the son of Achbor, and certain men with him (Jeremiah 26:22). They bring Uriah back and the king puts him to the sword.

Here, I thought, the two witnesses meet: a prophet, a warning, an officer named for Elnathan going down into Egypt, a king's letter, and words that weaken the hands of the soldiers. I proposed that the ostracon and the twenty-sixth chapter preserve the same affair. Then, with the prophet of the third letter in mind, I read the gap in the sixth as the words of the prophet are not good. The restoration made the two letters into one story. I am not ashamed of the reasoning. It was the reasoning of a man who had spent twenty years asking how the documents of a period fit together. But it is exactly the kind of reasoning that ought to frighten a philologist when it is his own.

IV. The linguistic test, applied to the tester

For my commentary on Job I have been called reckless with the received text, and I have answered always with one rule. I do not emend for convenience. I emend where the linguistic evidence supports it. A passage that remains obscure after every honest effort may be deep. A passage that becomes clear, grammatical and attested under a small and well-grounded change of letters was probably corrupted, and the change is the faithful reading. I have said this to students for fifty years, and I believe it.

But look at what the rule assumes. It assumes that there are letters there to be changed, and that they resist the editor. In Job the received text pushes back. If I propose to read yod where the Masoretes have waw, the waw is still on the page, and anyone may weigh my argument against it. An emendation has an opponent, and the opponent is the text.

A restoration in a lacuna has no opponent. The gap does not push back. Whatever I put into it, the sentence closes neatly around it, because I have chosen the word that makes the sentence close. Coherence, which is my best evidence when I emend a corrupt passage, is worth almost nothing when I fill an empty one, because I have made the coherence myself. When the result fits so well with my theory of the third letter and my reading of Jeremiah 26, that should make me more suspicious, not less. The better a restoration fits the restorer's argument, the more of the restorer is in it.

What, then, can push back in a gap? Only what is physically left of the writing: the edge of a letter at the break, a trace of ink at the margin of the damage, the space between the surviving words measured in the hand of this particular scribe. And here the record is against me. W. F. Albright, working from the photographs, saw at the start of the gap the remains of a sin, and read hassarim, the princes. Roland de Vaux, who examined the sherd itself, reported that he too saw the beginning of a sin. Johannes Hempel accepted the reading. A sin is not the first letter of navi. If there is a sin at the edge of that gap, the word is not prophet, however well the prophet suits the story.

I worked from photographs, as Albright did, and I know how faint that ink is. A trace seen in a photograph is open to argument, and I argued. But de Vaux had the sherd itself in front of him, and his eye on the original weighs more than mine on a print. Still, I must apply to myself the test I apply to every reader of Job. What does the letter actually say, as against what my reconstruction of the period requires it to say? The honest answer is that the physical evidence, such as it is, favours the princes, and that what favours the prophet is my wish for him. When the trace and the wish disagree, the trace wins. I said that about the Masoretes. I must say it about myself.

As for Coniah son of Elnathan, the objection is plain, and I should have weighed it more heavily than I did. Uriah died under Jehoiakim. The letters lay in the destruction of Lachish under Zedekiah, years later. A son of some Elnathan going down to Egypt is not Elnathan son of Achbor going down to Egypt. Elnathan was a common name, and in every generation of that kingdom someone was going down to Egypt, to buy horses or to beg for an army. Two documents that use the same names in the same small country are not yet two witnesses to the same event. I had joined them before I had proved that they belonged together.

V. What the princes give us

Now let me do what a philologist should do once he has given up a reading he was fond of. He should ask what the reading he has accepted means. Here the answer is better than the one I gave it up for.

Suppose the scribe wrote the words of the princes are not good, to weaken your hands. Then Hoshaiah, a field officer, is accusing the officials of the capital, men whose letters came down from Jerusalem in the same packet as the king's, of weakening the hands of the army. And in Jeremiah 38 the officials of the capital accuse the prophet of weakening the hands of the army, with the same idiom, before the same king, in the same war.

The phrase was used in both directions. It was not one party's description of another. It was the accusation of that whole season, ready to hand for anyone who wished to say that someone else was destroying the will to fight. The princes used it against Jeremiah, and the book of Jeremiah kept that use because it kept Jeremiah's story. Hoshaiah used it against the princes, or against whatever officials wrote those letters, and only the potsherd kept that use, because only the potsherd escaped the editors. We would never have known from the book alone that the men who brought the charge were open to it themselves. The book keeps the case for the prosecution. The sherd shows the same charge made against the prosecutors.

This is what I mean when I say that epigraphy is primary and not ornamental. The prophet I wanted would only have confirmed the book. Two witnesses saying the same thing about the same man would have been pleasant, and it would have taught nothing new. The princes, if they are there, add something the book does not have: a view of the charge from the other side, from the outpost, by an officer who had no interest in Jeremiah at all. He thought the letters from the capital were bad for his men, and he said so to the one person he could say it to.

I lived in Berlin until 1933. I heard in those years, from every side, that the army of 1918 had not been beaten but undermined, that it had been weakened from behind by men at home whose words were not good. I know what it is to live in a season when that charge is in the air, ready for anyone to use, and when nobody asks who is using it against whom. The officers of Judah knew it too. The phrase does not tell us who was guilty. It tells us that the charge was being made in every direction, and that in a city about to fall, every party had someone to blame for the slack hands.

VI. The brackets

I do not say that the princes is certain. The ink is too poor for certainty, and I would not take one man's certainty in place of another's. Thomas, at the end of his lecture, kept only the prophet of the third letter as beyond dispute, and on that he was right. What I say is narrower and, I think, more useful. A restoration has to be judged by different rules from an emendation. An emendation answers to the letters that are present. A restoration answers to the traces at the break and to nothing else. The story the restorer is telling counts for nothing. When the traces are uncertain, the gap should be printed as a gap, with the possible words given in a note and the reasons for each, and the reader left to weigh them.

I did put brackets on the page in 1938. But brackets protect the reader only if the reader remembers them, and readers forget. A restored word is quoted once without its brackets, then copied from the quotation, and after that it looks like part of the text. An editor who knows how his restorations will travel must choose them as though there were no brackets, because in practice there will be none.

To my students, in Berlin and in Jerusalem, I gave a damaged inscription and said: tell me what it says, then tell me how you know. I would add one instruction now. Before you fill a gap, write down on a separate sheet what you hope it will say. Then fill it. Then compare the two sheets. If they agree, you have not finished; you have only begun to look for the evidence against yourself. If the trace at the edge of the break is a sin, then the word begins with sin, however much you wanted it to begin with nun.

The sherd is in Jerusalem now. It is a brown fragment in a case, and most of the people who walk past it cannot read it. The gap in the fifth line is the same size it was when Starkey's men lifted the sherd out of the ash in 1935, and nothing anyone has written in the margin has changed it. In the lines below the gap the officer is still telling his commander that since he read the letters from Jerusalem there has been no peace for him. Not long after he wrote it, the Babylonians set fire to the gate, and the guardroom burned down over his letter.

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Harrīō Torczynerō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Harry Torczyner, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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