The Lachish Letters
Lachish is the second city of the kingdom of Judah, the great fortress of the Shephelah commanding the road from the coastal plain to Jerusalem. Its presence in the biblical record is dense and grim. Joshua takes it.…
Biblical Narrative
Lachish is the second city of the kingdom of Judah, the great fortress of the Shephelah commanding the road from the coastal plain to Jerusalem. Its presence in the biblical record is dense and grim. Joshua takes it. Sennacherib of Assyria besieges and storms it in 701 BCE, an event the Assyrian king commemorates with a famous wall-relief in his palace at Nineveh. And in the final years of the kingdom of Judah, as the Babylonian armies of Nebuchadnezzar close in, Lachish appears one last time in the prophet Jeremiah's terse summary of the dwindling resistance: ״when the king of Babylon's army fought against Jerusalem, and against all the cities of Judah that were left, against Lachish, and against Azekah: for these defenced cities remained of the cities of Judah.״
The verse — Jeremiah 34:7 — is a sentence of deceptive simplicity. It tells us that as the Babylonian armies advanced through Judah in 588 BCE, three of its fortified cities still held out: Jerusalem in the central highlands, Lachish in the western Shephelah, and Azekah on the road between them. Two outposts and a capital, watching one another across a tightening cordon. The order of the names — Lachish first, Azekah second, with the outermost city listed before the inner one — has long been read as a hint that Azekah, closer to Lachish, would fall first. Jeremiah does not narrate the sequel. But the city of Lachish itself preserved a record of the moment.
The Bible's other Lachish detail comes from the same chapter of Jeremiah. King Zedekiah of Judah, in a desperate bid for divine favor as the siege closed, made a covenant with the people of Jerusalem to release every Hebrew slave according to the Mosaic law of the seventh year. The people swore to it. The slaves were freed. And then, when the Babylonian army temporarily withdrew on news of an approaching Egyptian relief force, the slave-owners reneged: they brought the freedmen back into bondage. Jeremiah preaches a fierce sermon on that betrayal — and it is in concluding that sermon that the prophet pauses to note the surviving cities, naming Lachish and Azekah.
The siege resumed. Azekah fell. Lachish fell. Jerusalem fell. The kingdom of Judah ended in 586 BCE with the burning of the Temple and the deportation of its remaining elite. But beneath the rubble of Lachish's gate-tower, in the guardroom where the city's last commanders had worked, a small archive of inscribed potsherds — letters and dispatches written in the final desperate weeks — was buried by the collapse, and lay there for two and a half thousand years.
When the king of Babylon's army fought against Jerusalem, and against all the cities of Judah that were left, against Lachish, and against Azekah: for these defenced cities remained of the cities of Judah.Jeremiah 34:7
Archaeology · History · Genetics
Tel Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir) is one of the most thoroughly excavated Iron Age sites in Israel. The first major campaign was led by James Leslie Starkey for the Wellcome-Marston Expedition from 1932 until Starkey's murder by Arab brigands on the Hebron road in January 1938. Starkey's seasons exposed the Iron Age II destruction layers — the 701 BCE Assyrian destruction (Stratum III) and the 586 BCE Babylonian destruction (Stratum II) — and recovered the great Iron Age city gate, the Judahite palace-fort on the acropolis, and the Babylonian-period siege ramp built against the southwestern corner. Subsequent campaigns by Yohanan Aharoni (1966–68), David Ussishkin (1973–94), and most recently Yosef Garfinkel (2013–17) have refined the stratigraphy and exposed earlier and later phases.
The Lachish Letters were found by Starkey's team in January 1935 in a small guardroom against the inner face of the outer city gate, in the destruction debris of the 586 BCE Babylonian assault. The cache consists of twenty-one ostraca — inked Hebrew inscriptions on broken potsherds — written in the cursive paleo-Hebrew script of the late 7th and early 6th centuries BCE. Three more ostraca from the same context were recovered by Ussishkin in 1938 and 1966. The letters are in a guardroom because that is where dispatches were brought in and dispatched out: the room functioned as the field-headquarters of the city's commander.
The letters are short — most fit on a single sherd no larger than a postcard — and are written in a workmanlike administrative Hebrew nearly identical to the Hebrew of the contemporary biblical books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. They consist mainly of dispatches from a junior officer named Hoshaiah, stationed at an outpost between Lachish and Jerusalem, to his superior, the Lachish garrison commander Ya'osh. They report on troop movements, fire-signal communications, prophetic warnings circulating in Jerusalem, the dispatching of officers to Egypt for diplomatic-military negotiations, and the receipt and forwarding of letters from Jerusalem. They are the only contemporary, eyewitness account of the final weeks of the kingdom of Judah from the side of its defenders.
The standard editions are Harry Torczyner (Naftali Herz Tur-Sinai), The Lachish Letters (Lachish I, Oxford University Press, 1938), and Dennis Pardee's chapter in his Handbook of Ancient Hebrew Letters (Scholars Press, 1982; revised Society of Biblical Literature, 2002). The script is studied in Frank Moore Cross, ״Epigraphic Notes on the Ammān Citadel Inscription״ in BASOR 193 (1969), and in Joseph Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet (Magnes, 1982). The letters' historical value, especially Letter IV's mention of Azekah, is treated in Anson Rainey and R. Steven Notley, The Sacred Bridge (Carta, 2006).
And let my lord know that we are watching for the signal-fires of Lachish, according to all the indications which my lord has given, for we cannot see Azekah.Lachish Ostracon IV, lines 10–13 (translation after Pardee, 1982)