Tel Arad BEARS SILENT WITNESS

A lost city. A mysterious temple. A cache of ancient inscriptions. These might sound like the basis for an adventure movie. In fact, all this and more lay hidden for centuries under layers of desert sand at Tel Arad, Israel, until archaeologists began digging there.


TODAY,  a modern Arad strikes many visitors as a typical Israeli town.  With 27,000 inhabitants, it is located in the Judean wilderness to the west of the Dead Sea. However, the ancient Israelite city of Arad was located some five miles to the west. It is there that archaeologists have carefully stripped away layers of sand, uncovering a wealth of structures and inscriptions.  

These inscriptions were found on ostraca fragments of pottery used as writing tablets.  Writing in that way was a common practice in Bible times. The dig at Tel Arad yielded what has been described as the riches collection of such ostraca ever found in Israel.  What, though, is the value of this archaeological dig? 

The findings at Tel Arad cover a long period of the Bible history, ranging from  days of the Judges of Israel down to the Babylonian invasion of Judah in 607 B.C.E.  So these  discoveries help to confirm the accuracy of the Bible. They also provide enlightening examples of the way people in ancient Israel view the personal name of God. 

Next time: Arad and the Bible

From the Watchtower magazine, 2008