YA'AKOV'S OSSUARY

In case you hadn’t heard this story before, here are ‘the bare bones’ for you to pick over…(excuse the pun!)

Archaeologists tell us that ossuaries (bone boxes) were only used within 20 miles of Jerusalem from 20 BC to AD 70 when Jerusalem was sacked by the Roman Army. They cost a tradesman about a day’s wages.

How did you end up in an ossuary?                                         
Your grieving family would assemble in the standing pit of a cave tomb and place your body in a loculus – a 6 foot long tunnel – sealed with a blocking stone. 
After about a year, the flesh would have desiccated enough for your bones to be recovered (any volunteers?) then stored in an ossuary large enough for the long femur bones.

Oded Golan of Tel Aviv, Israel, is a private collector of ancient artifacts who, in the 1970’s, bought this empty ossuary from an Arab antiques dealer who said it had been found in Silwan, an Arab village in Jerusalem. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947, this find was not professionally excavated so was deemed ‘unprovenanced’.                               

Golan had no idea of its significance until visited over 25 years later by André Lemaire, a professor from École Pratique des Hautes Études at The Sorbonne in Paris.

The Geological Survey of the State of Israel then confirmed that this specimen had been cut from chalk limestone quarried from the Menuha Formation of the Mt. Scopus Group nearby, during the 1^st or 2^nd Century AD. A patina uniformly covering the ossuary – even within the entire inscription - showed its great age and there was no evidence of modern tools having been used on it.                                                   

Permission was obtained from the Israel Antiquities Authority for the ossuary to be shipped to Canada in October 2002, where it attracted the attention of thousands at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.                                    

Why the fascination with an empty bone box?                                          

This inscription on the face of the box is written in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jews of this era:

יﬠקובבריוסףּאחוידישוﬠ

What on earth does that say?                                                                            

Reading from right to left it starts with:           ‘Ya’akov bar Yosef…’                       
or in English:     ‘Jacob son of Joseph…’ 

Common Jewish names…nothing to get excited about. What about the rest of it?

Reading left from א it says:          ‘achui di Yeshua’

Yeshua?....isn’t that the Aramaic name for Jesus?

Sure it is. This guy was the achui di or brother of….Jesus.

Whoa!!...archaeological proof of Jesus Christ in the New Testament??  
Not discovered until this century??                                                       

So who is Ya’akov?.... (NEXT)
Click on: http://hotspuds.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/was-yaakov-brother-of-jesus.html

  

Acknowledgements:  

Hershel Shanks, founder Biblical Archaeological Society     

Shanks H. & Witherington B, ‘The Brother of Jesus’, Harper Collins, New York, 2003    

Photo credits:     

en.wikipedia.org    

normgeisler.com