In one line: Twenty-one inked potsherds found in the ruined gatehouse of Lachish in 1935 and 1938 carry the last messages of a Judahite officer as Nebuchadnezzar's army closed in, one says he is watching for the fire-signals of Lachish because Azekah's can no longer be seen, the same two towns Jeremiah 34:7 names as the last fortified cities of Judah still standing.
What was found. In January and February 1935 the British archaeologist James Leslie Starkey, directing the Wellcome-Marston Archaeological Research Expedition at Tell ed-Duweir, the site of biblical Lachish, found eighteen ostraca (potsherds written on in ink) in a room by the outer city gate, in the burnt debris of the city that Nebuchadnezzar's army destroyed; three more were found in 1938, making twenty-one. They are written in the Hebrew script and language of the last years of the kingdom of Judah, and most are letters, or drafts of letters, from a subordinate officer named Hoshaiah (Hoshayahu) at an outpost to his superior Yaush at Lachish, in the months before the city fell, the campaign that ended with the fall of Jerusalem in 587 or 586 BC (the year is debated). They were published in 1938 by Harry Torczyner (later Naphtali Tur-Sinai) as Lachish I: The Lachish Letters. Seventeen are in the British Museum; the rest, including Letter 6, are in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. The greeting formulas invoke the name of God, YHWH, in the four Hebrew letters the Bible uses, ordinary Judahite correspondence from the very decade the book of Jeremiah describes.
What they say, paraphrased, because no public-domain English translation exists. The most quoted is Letter 4, in which the writer reports that he is watching for the fire-signals of Lachish, according to the signs his superior gave him, because he cannot see Azekah. Jeremiah dates one of his oracles to the moment "when the king of Babylon's army was fighting against Jerusalem, and against all the cities of Judah that were left, against Lachish and against Azekah; for these alone remained of the cities of Judah as fortified cities" (Jeremiah 34:7, ASV). Letter 3 mentions a letter that came through "the prophet", the first appearance of the ordinary Hebrew word for prophet, nabi, in a text outside the Bible, as D. Winton Thomas observed. Letter 6 complains that the words of the officials are not good and weaken the hands, the idiom Jeremiah's opponents use of him in the same crisis: "he weakeneth the hands of the men of war that remain in this city" (Jeremiah 38:4, ASV).
What they show, and the arguments kept apart from the facts. The facts: real Judahite officers wrote real Hebrew letters, in the name of YHWH, from the fortress-line the Bible names, in the last months before […]