A Late Bronze Age Canaanite Jar Inscription from the 2025 Excavation Season at Lachish

During the 2025 season of excavations at Tel Lachish, a partially preserved inscription was found in an unambiguous twelfth-century BCE archaeological context associated with the site's last Late Bronze Age settlement. The inscription consists of six letters written in red ink on the shoulder of a ceramic jar. Although the potsherd is horizontally broken at the mid-height of the inscription, the surviving parts of the letters allow the personal name Bʿlšlṭ to be read.

This name is built on the root šlṭ, which until now has been widely considered a much later, Persian-period loan from Aramaic. Furthermore, the inscription was written in the standardised Linear Canaanite script and displays cursive features, apparently indicating that it was written by a person accustomed to writing with a stylus and ink.

Dr. Daniel Vainstub is a Semitic epigraphist whose research centres on the epigraphy and palaeography of ancient West Semitic scripts, Northwest Semitic philology, Biblical Hebrew, the history of alphabetic writing and the interpretation of inscriptions from ancient Israel and the wider Levant.

He completed his PhD at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His dissertation examined governmental institutions in Phoenician cities from the Bronze Age through the beginning of the Roman period. He subsequently taught and conducted research in the fields of Bible, archaeology, the ancient Near East and Jewish thought at Ben-Gurion University.

His research combines close linguistic and palaeographic analysis with archaeological context. His publications address Canaanite, Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic, Samaritan and Ancient South Arabian inscriptions, as well as questions concerning biblical language, ancient administration, religion, literacy and the development of alphabetic scripts.

Dr. Vainstub's work on the inscribed ivory comb from Lachish helped bring international attention to what has been described as the earliest known complete sentence written in the Canaanite language. His interpretation of the Ophel inscription as Ancient South Arabian and Sabaean was recognised by ASOR as one of the notable archaeological stories of 2023.

He also edited The Persian and Hellenistic Periods in Israel: A Southern Perspective, published in 2018, and Worship and Burial in the Shfela and Negev Regions throughout the Ages, published in 2019.