A few words on ossuaries.

This may seem a macabre choice for my first blog post on the Travelujah site - why choose a subject closely associated with death? - but in fact, ossuaries are also intimately associated with life, particularly life in Jerusalem of the first century CE.

For those who don't know or need to be refreshed: during a very brief period in Jerusalem's history, Jews engaged in an expensive, laborious, prolonged and utterly inconceivable (to us) process of burying their dead, called "secondary burial". First a family would buy, commission or excavate by themselves a cave in the soft rock around Jerusalem. (I say Jerusalem because well over 90 percent of all known ossuaries were deposited in caves in a wide band around that city.) When someone died, the family would lay the body of the person on a shelf, in a pit, in a special niche called a loculus, or simply on the floor, and then seal the cave. Then they would wait a year, during which time they commissioned an ossuary, which is a box, almost always made of local limestone, big enough to hold the bones of the deceased. When the year had passed, the family would open the cave, ceremoniously gather the bones into the ossuary and put it on a shelf, in a loculus, etc. ... or just leave it on the floor of the cave. The identity of the person or persons in the ossuary would often be scratched on the box or its lid, incised on the wall or the loculus where the ossuary was stored, or merely preserved in the family's collective memory (in this last case, to our chagrin, the information has been irretrievably lost).

To our modern sensibilities, this elaborate death ritual is somewhat bizarre. (When my mother first learned about it, she could not imagine handling the bones of her loved ones a year after their death - or really any time - or what the death-filled cave would have smelled like.) But as I said, it is intimately connected with life, in at least two ways. The first connection has to do with a widely held - and maybe even correct! - theory explaining the ritual. It is assumed that there is a deep underlying reason for the practice of secondary burial - why go to all that trouble and expense? The proposal is that secondary burial reflects the Jews' belief in the resurrection of the body at some time in the future, for which the preservation of the bones intact was essential. (One of the worst fates a Jews could suffer was to be lost at sea - no body to be resurrected!) The disintegration of the flesh during the first year after death was interpreted as the person's painful atonement for and purification of his or her sins. The first centuries BCE and CE were a time of great ferment in Judaea, and rising expectations in the imminent apocalypse, i.e., the end of time and resurrection of the righteous dead for a new era. Secondary burial, the use of ossuaries, provides graphic, material evidence of that belief and that excited expectation.

Moreover, secondary burial provided a space-saving, efficient way not only to preserve a person's mortal remains intact, but also to keep families together: a family who lived together would sleep together and await resurrection. Often the bones of more than one (related) person were interred in the same box.

There is something dramatic and melancholy in each discovery of a burial cave with ossuaries, whether looted or inviolate. Here are the bones of people, still waiting, tucked into ossuaries often lovingly ornamented and inscribed 2000 years ago. Most ossuaries discovered in modern times have been removed from their caves, often their bones scattered and lost. In modern-day Israel, ancient bones are now re-buried according to Jewish law, but for decades of modern exploration, not to mention centuries of grave-robbing, that was not the case. Many other caves, together with their ossuaries, are cemented into the foundations of modern structures, some not even examined because of the greed or negligence of impatient contractors who failed to call in archaeologists to record the site.

About 1500 ossuaries are on record today. The exact number is not known, because in the more than 150 years of exploration, excavation (both amateur and professional), looting and collection, the hundreds of boxes found in and around Jerusalem have been scattered around the globe - some in private collections, many in churches and museums in Israel and around the world. There is no central database of all ossuaries ever discovered in Israel. For example, I recently have examined two boxes, originally from Jerusalem, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and I've just received photographic documentation of three more in the museum of the University of Missouri. How they got there, I do not know, and frankly do not ask - I am interested merely in determining authenticity of the boxes and their inscriptions, and publishing the information in its proper place in the scientific corpus. These two museums have been wonderfully cooperative; others have not been so.

The second connection of ossuaries to life is found in the content of their inscriptions, Of all the ossuaries recovered from burial caves, about a third bear inscriptions. These usually contain little more than a name and family relationship - father, son, mother, wife, brother etc. of so-and-so - and occasionally a personal detail, such as whether the deceased was a priest or had an important profession such as scribe. It is true that some ossuaries can be connected to known historical figures, such as that of Nicanor of Alexandria who made the bronze gates for the Temple, or the granddaughter of the high priest Theophilus, or even (possibly) the high priest Caiaphas. Certain ossuaries, such as the one inscribed "Jacob the son of Joseph the brother of Jesus" (provenance unknown) and a group of six inscribed boxes from East Talpiyot bearing names similar to those in the family of Jesus of Nazareth, have recently created much noise in the media. But it is not these sensational individual pieces which interest me so much as the aggregate of the hundreds of names and remnants of lives which are not mentioned in any other source and would otherwise be lost entirely. Through ossuary inscriptions we meet individuals named Shoshana, Shimi, Horkanos, Dositheos, Zechariah, and many, many more, as well as dozens with the common names Shimon (Simon), Yehosua (Jesus), Yehuda (Judah), Mariam (Mary), Yehonatan (Jonathan) and Yosef (Joseph).

As a group, even if they represent only a fraction of the people who actually lived and died in Jerusalem in the late Second Temple period, these individuals' inscribed ossuaries reveal patterns of naming practices, family relationships and other matters of social history for which we have no other source. Thus it is not the spectacular single finds but the hundreds of ossuary inscriptions considered collectively which are invaluable for historians.

In this respect, every addition to the corpus, even if it contains one common name, is another brick in the edifice of knowledge, and another life recovered from the dustbin of history.