An Unrecognized Prophetic Ostracon from Horvat 'Uza.

• Author: Isaac, Moise
• Position: Critical essay

Among the finds excavated from the fortress of Horvat 'Uza between 1982 and 1988 was a fragment of a burnished bowl with a painted inscription. This ostracon was located in the eastern chamber of the city gate of the eastern Negev fortress, and found in Stratum IV, dating it to the second half of the seventh century BCE. On it were written thirteen lines in a script exhibiting the penmanship of a very skilled writer of epigraphic Hebrew (fig. 1). Portions of the inscription are either illegible or effaced, and although scholars have been publishing analyses of the ostracon since the early 1990s (e.g., Beit-Arieh 1993: 55-65; Cross 1993: 64-65), (1) so far there has been no consensus on its genre.

The ostracon, registered in 2007 as Horvat 'Uza inscription 1 [henceforth HU-1], is generally understood to be a literary composition (Beit-Arieh 2007: 122-27; Cross 2000: 112; Dobbs-Allsopp et al. 2005: 521, 526). However, there is no agreement on the nature of its content, purpose, or genre. It has been suggested that the ostracon was part of a literary legal document (Beit-Arieh 2007: 127), a wisdom poem (Lemaire 1995: 221-22; Davies 2005: 137-38; Sasson 2005; Na'aman 2013: 231), a divorce case (Davies 2005: 138), and an incantation (Albertz 2008: 107 n. 29). In addition, some scholars have analyzed particular portions of the inscription as a prophecy (Cross 2000: 111-13; Davies 2002: 277-78; 2005: 158; Becking 2010: 39). (2) In this paper, I use the science of linguistic anthropology to bring new insights to the genre and register of the ostracon, and to give it the thorough and contextualized analysis that it deserves. My analysis will show that HU-1 is, in fact, a prophetic oracle.

The theories and methods of linguistic anthropology allow us to better describe the linguistic meaning of the ostracon's text, the social meaning of its discourse forms, and the relationship of these linguistic forms to the semiotics of register and identity. Previous studies of HU-1 have examined the denotative value of its words and expressions, that is, the literal, dictionary-type delinitions. However, this approach has real limitations; in particular, it does not allow for the ways that language is a social practice. The tools of linguistic anthropology take into account both denotative meaning and social meaning, which help us understand the semiotic register of HU-l's linguistic forms and the ideologies that they reference. This semiotic analysis, when combined with a close philological analysis, brings us to the definitive generic classification of a prophetic oracle.

A LINGUISTIC-ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH TO ANCIENT HEBREW TEXT-ARTIFACTS

I will begin with a brief description of linguistic anthropology and the fresh perspective it can bring to the analysis of ancient texts. Linguistic anthropology is a scientific method that argues that language is quintessentially semiotic, that is, it indexes or points to something "other" than itself (Peirce 1955: 102-3). (3) Due to this indexicality, language is therefore linked to social structure and culture. In the words of Edward Sapir, "language is a guide to social reality" (1949: 68). Language points to the political and ideological beliefs, norms, assumptions, values, and structures of society, whether or not its speakers are aware of it. In other words, a microanalysis of language at a particular moment can be linked to macrosocial meaning, including political and cultural ideologies (Duranti 1997; Ahearn 2012; Enfield, Kockelman, and Sidnell 2014).

Words do not have inherent meaning, nor do they do anything in and of themselves. Words are instruments of communication whose meaning is socially motivated and constructed, and not autonomous. Members of a speech community are socialized into using language according to societal structures and institutional centers of power (Silverstein 2004). This means that some vernacular features achieve greater social salience over time; for example, the choice to use honorifics (such as the use of usted versus tu in Spanish) communicates social meaning far more than any kind of referential or denotational meaning.

There is a long tradition of theories in linguistic anthropology that try to account for the pragmatic salience of various linguistic forms and the relationship between linguistic structure and linguistic ideology (Silverstein 1979; Errington 1988; Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998; Kroskrity 2000; Woolard 2008). (4) Pragmatic salience refers to the level of social awareness and ideological activity--ranging from practical to discursive knowledge--associated with particular linguistic features or variants that are important to a specific sociocultural group. (5)

Hence, in order to truly analyze language, it is necessary to know more than just grammar; one also needs to know how language is being used, how it is encoding social meaning. It is important to understand language use in its social context, the high level of pragmatic salience associated with a particular variable, the interaction of language with identity formation, and its relation to language ideologies. In other words, the object of analysis is what people do with words, which words are saliently featured, what the words mean, how the words are used, what people are doing when they speak those words, and what the words say about the speakers' identity.

Linguistic anthropology also provides a framework by which the linguistic features of HU-1 can be analyzed in terms of its context, the markers of a speaker's/writer's identity, and semiotic registers. A semiotic register is an inventory of features (such as stereotypic verbal cues, a special vocabulary, and stylistic devices) that are utilized in different social circumstances and occasions, and that project social positional identities (Agha 2007: 80, 168). (6)

The study of semiotic registers evaluates the manner by which the continuing use and recycling of these styles in appropriate contexts become codified, distributed, naturalized, and materialized, take on special meaning, and become ideologically linked with situations, places, and people. Ultimately, HU-1 is a text-artifact that must be contextualized by noting which coeval practices are available for interpretation (Silverstein 2006), as well as what these practices reveal about the very nature of an inscription in a particular genre. This linguistic-anthropological approach is a means to understanding the kind of social context projected by the inscription, as well as the ways that its linguistic features function as an arrow pointing to the genre of the text and identity of the speaker/writer.

Select portions of the Hebrew Bible and inscriptions, as cultural documents from the Late Iron Age II period, provide more details regarding what audience members needed to know in order to detect and understand the performances and discourses found in the communities of ancient Israel and Judah. The Hebrew Bible is an invaluable tool for a cultural analysis of communication because it provides a window into understanding "who communicates in which ways to whom and on what occasions" (Silverstein 1997: 129) in the Judean speech community.

Admittedly, comparing discourses in Iron Age II inscriptions and the Hebrew Bible is not without its challenges. First, discourse salience (or linguistic forms that members recognize and employ in mediating social relations) in text-artifacts from ancient times is difficult to define, and the outcome is both enigmatic and more or less impossible to predict. It can also be challenging to understand why some variants come to be ignored, avoided, or absent, and others featured, marked, or privileged. Second, there are numerous problems involved with relying on data from the Hebrew Bible: There are a limited number of inscriptional sources to compare with the Hebrew Bible; the texts cover a vast time period; and there is no scholarly consensus on dating various texts in the Hebrew Bible (Schniedewind 2004; Carr 2011).

Additionally, many discourse forms, genres, and registers underwent a series of transformations, revalorizations, and losses of meaning over time, sometimes during periods about which we know little. Nevertheless, because inscriptional languages reflect the cultural present (that is, they point back to a pre-seventh-century BCE period, not forward to the Hellenistic period), linguistic forms shared by select biblical writers and inscriptions reflect a reciprocal cultural milieu of the late Iron Age II period. It is important to use all information available in the reconstruction of the "total linguistic fact" of cultural discourses (Silverstein 1985: 220).

Discursive forms in the Horvat 'Uza inscription that are similar to those in the Hebrew Bible provide only a small window into the linguistic habitus (7) of forms accessible in ancient Judah; that is, parts of the Bible date to the same time and place, so they can be used to give insights into these inscriptions, and inscriptions can help give insights into biblical texts.

In the remainder of this article, I use the tools and theories of linguistic anthropology to uncover which institutional centers of authority gave license to the literary style of the ostracon; in other words, what institutions established the writer's orientation to a certain identity-relevant category such as prophecy? I will explore the ideological relationships between indexical and recycled discourse forms in this ostracon and in the Hebrew Bible, and examine the ways that these discourse styles include pragmatically salient features that index register, genre, social identity, and power.

Correlating the forms in this ostracon with those in the Hebrew Bible allows us to understand how they became fixed with social meaning and ideologically associated with certain properties. These properties, I contend, align the literary ostracon from Horvat 'Uza with the genre of prophecy (Cross...