The Key to the Community

The last three letters (on the left) in this drawing of line 8 of the ostracon are critical. We read them yh\d or Yah\ad, the Community. With the particle l (lamed—the fourth letter from the left) before it, it reads “to the Community,” the technical name of the sectarian community of the scrolls.

The key letter is the last one, a dalet (d). It has been suggested that this might in fact be a resá (r). For the salient diagnostic feature that distinguishes dalet from resá in the formal and cursive scripts of this era, we must look at the right shoulder of the letter, which has survived. The vertical and the horizontal strokes come together differently in dalet and resá. In a dalet, the horizontal stroke hits the vertical down stroke well below its top, creating a little tick where the vertical stroke sticks up above the horizontal stroke. The letter resá, to the contrary, has either a curving right shoulder or a right-angled shoulder, but no tick above the right angle. Thus, even though the bottom of the letter has been cut off in our ostracon, it can only be a dalet.¹. If that is so, no plausible reading other than Yah\ad can be suggested.