Wine Shipments to Samaria from Royal Vineyards

Abstract

The Samaria Ostraca contain a subset of receipts that record wine shipments from what were evidently royal vineyards. But this particular group of ostraca has been largely overlooked in the study of the Northern Kingdom, probably resulting from the fact that not all of the ostraca were published in the editio princeps. This article presents a new edition of these ostraca, accompanied by an analysis of their particular features. The results of the analysis confirm that the wine shipments were the privileged possession of the king of Israel.

Keywords:

• Ancient Israel
• Samaria
• Samaria ostraca
• Northern Kingdom
• Israelite kingship
• Epigraphy
• Northwest Semitic inscriptions