Tomb of the Royal Steward

זאת         יהו אשר על הבית. אין פה כסף. וזהב             

  אם       ועצמת אמתה אתה. ארור האדם אשר              

יפתח את זאת

This inscription was found in the village of Silwan, across the Kidron valley from the City of David. This area seemed to be a cemetary during the Iron Age. Sadly for us, a Byzantine monk decided to make this tomb his home and put a beam across the room, obliberating part of the inscription. And he even chose to rub out the name of the person buried. Very sad, since it might very well refer to a biblical character. But even without the name, it is still a very interesting inscription. Details below include a commentary on the inscription, short comments on the writing style, and the biblical connection. 

This is the [grave of ????]yahu who was the royal steward. There is no silver or gold here, only the [his bones] and the bones of his maid servant with him. Cursed the man who will open this.

b. This inscription appears to be a grave inscription which had two main functions. One function was to warn away robbers from robbing the tomb. The second function was to identify who was buried there. The inscription has three main parts. The first is a description of who is in the grave and his identifying characteristic from his life. In this case, we do not have the man’s name, but we do know that he was the royal steward. The second section is the contents of the tomb. The inscription claims that there is no silver and gold inside, presumably to give a practical reason why someone should not rob the tomb. This might also have implications for literacy: were even grave robbers expected to be able to read? Instead of valuable, the grave did contain the bones of the man (if the restoration is correct) and of his maid servant. The bones of his maid servant is unexpected, as we would think it more logical that the bones of his wife would be buried with him. There are several possible answers to this. Perhaps these really are just the bones of his maidservant and his wife is buried elsewhere, perhaps in a family tomb. Or perhaps maidservant was a technical term for a high government office and refers to an office that his wife occupied. So in this case the bones would belong to his wife, who is called by the name of her office, just like her husband. Or maybe the man really just did not like his wife and preferred his maidservant. We simply do not know. The third section of the inscription is the curse formula, where the inscription places a curse on anyone who opens the grave.

The main interesting part of the orthography is the first occurrence of a medial vowel letter, the ו in ארור. While other earlier inscriptions had medial ו or י, they were originally part of the root or were explained some other way (such as the י in בית). But in this inscription the ו is a pure vowel letter. Two of the dots appear to be sentence dividers, but a third is placed in an odd spot and its function is obscure (after כסף). The paleography is similar to that of the Silwan tunnel inscription, which puts them at about the same time. Several of the letters are characterized by extremely long tails, especially the word ארור.

            The office of אשר על הבית is mentioned several times in the Bible. It is first mentioned in Genesis 43:16 in relation to a man who is in charge of the house of Joseph. 2 Kings 18:18 mentions Eliakim who was over the house and is included among a group of men with political clout, so apparently by this point the office had turned political. Finally, there is a passage about Shebna the steward in Isaiah 22:15, who is replaced by Eliakim. The Isaiah text describes how Shebna built for himself a tomb cut out of the rock and how he was going to be judged for that act, so some scholars have reconstructed Shebnayahu, the full form of the name Shebna, in the inscription. The office of steward apparently was some kind of important political office, which is supported by the extravagance of the tomb described in Isaiah that he was able to build.

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