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# Old Hebrew Inscriptions from Tel Arad

**Authors:** Ludwik Walenty Stefaniak · **Year:** 1969 (Folia Orientalia 11; the catalogue gives 2026, the date it was put online) · **Venue:** Folia Orientalia 11, 264 ff. **Link:** [wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/2365](https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/2365) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) (per the publisher)

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**Authors (1)**

1. [Ludwik Walenty Stefaniak](https://openalex.org/A5140604504) h 0 · 0 citations · 1 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex-snapshot (2026-10-14); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

A lecture of 1970 that introduces the then-new finds of the Tel Arad excavations (1962–1967): the site's strata from the Chalcolithic to the Mamluk period, the Israelite fortress and its sanctuary, and some 200 Hebrew ostraca from the 10th to the 6th century BCE, found across many rooms and strata rather than in one archive. After a short history of Old Hebrew epigraphy, the author gives a philological commentary on two "letters to Eliashib" from the 7th-century stratum: orders to issue wine (in bat measures) and flour to the Kittim, with the date written, and a letter from a subordinate that greets "my lord Eliashib" and mentions the "house of YHWH", which he takes for the Jerusalem temple. He notes the letter formula וְעַתָּה "and now" shared with the Lachish letters. The extracted text is a poor OCR of a two-column scan, mixed with the end of an unrelated Turkish article.

## Ideas

- I1. Add the epistolary formulae of the Arad and Lachish letters (address "to my lord X", greeting "YHWH bless you / for your peace", the transition וְעַתָּה, the order with a jussive or imperative) to the manual as the non-literary baseline for Torah letter-like speech, and as the source of the later observation that לֵאמֹר appears in letters (see the Miller-Naudé card).
- I2. A `prag` check: וְעַתָּה at the head of a quote marks the turn from preamble to request; count in the Torah how often וְעַתָּה is followed within the same quote by an imperative, jussive or cohortative.

## For Mova

I1 is text for [Discourse: narrative, speech and the shape of a text](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/09-discourse/) (direct speech, politeness) and `12-biblical-mishnaic-modern.md` (inscriptions as a stage of the language), citing modern editions for the readings; this 1969 paper is only a historical introduction. I2 is a count on the Torah trees and a possible cue for the `propose` rule in `tools/macula/src/prag.rs`.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```
@inproceedings{stefaniak2026old,
  title = {{Old Hebrew Inscriptions from Tel Arad}},
  author = {Stefaniak, Ludwik Walenty},
  booktitle = {Folia Orientalia},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/2365}
}
```

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