Yahweh in Hamath in the 8th Century BC: Cuneiform Material and Historical Deductions Author(s): Stephanie Dalley Source:

Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 40, Fasc. 1 (Jan., 1990), pp. 21-32 Published by: BRILL Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1519260 Accessed: 15/12/2009 08:43
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Vetus TestamentumLX, 1 (1990)

YAHWEH IN HAMATH IN THE 8TH CENTURY BC: CUNEIFORM MATERIAL AND HISTORICAL
DEDUCTIONS1 by

STEPHANIE DALLEY
Oxford

Cuneiform clay tablets are a rich source of personal names, and they often give valuable details of location or nationality in precisely dated records. Because many names take the form of a phrase or short sentence which incorporates the name of a god or goddess, we can trace the popularity of deities at different times over a span of some two thousand years, and we can sometimes assign a person to a particular city-state on the basis of that divine element. In the case of Judah and Israel, we know from the Old Testament that the cult of Yahweh under that name was central to Hebrew worship in Jerusalem and Samaria, from some point early in the Iron Age. Therefore when a name compounded with Yahweh is written in a cuneiform text of the Iron Age, whether the man is based in Palestine or whether he is far from home, he is assumed to be an Israelite. J. H. Tigay's recent study2 of personal names from Palestine has shown clearly and convincingly that Judah and Israel were relatively monotheistic early in the Iron Age. In general the god name is the most easily recognized element; but in the case of the name Yahweh written in cuneiform there are some unusual possibilities for ambiguity.3 In 8th and 7th century names the element that may be interpreted as Yahweh is written
The author is grateful to Professor E. W. Nicholson and Dr J. Day for their help. A draft of the argument was presented at an OT seminar in Oxford in November 1986, and a fresh version to the 64th meeting of the Society for Old Testament Study in Oxford in July 1988. 2 You Shall Have No Other Gods (Atlanta, 1986). 3 J. Boardman et al. (ed.), CambridgeAncient History III/1 (3rd edn, 1982), p. 472; pp. 489-90; M. Weippert in E. Meissner et al. (ed.), Reallexikon der Assyriologie, s.v. "Jahwe".

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IA, IA-u, ia-a-u and i-u.4 The sign IA can be read as ia, ii and iu, and so the first two spellings can be taken either as Yu, corresponding to the later from Y6 in Hebrew, or as Ya'u. The lengthened writing ia-a-u'contains the vowel a which acts as a materlectionisfor the ambiguous IA sign, and may either be an explicit writing for the shorter forms, or an alternative to them, just as Hebrew has alternatives Yahu and Y6. In the first position, as in Yau-bi'di, the divine name takes the divine determinative, but in the second position as in Izri-Yau it does not. In the informal military lists from Nimrud the element Yau never takes the divine determinative. This inconsistency is very common among divine names which are written phonetically;5 Kubaba the goddess of Carchemish gets the same treatment; so do Si' and Allaya.6 At this period hypocoristic endings are written almost invariably as or a-a, with which there is no possibility for confusion. By contrast, in names of the 2nd millennium BC, the hypocoristic ending ia is eminently confusible, and this ambiguity led to some ill-founded claims that Yahweh had been discovered in texts of that period. Therefore, various attempts to find Yahweh-bearing names in the Bronze Age tablets from the archives of Ebla,7 Mari, Rimah,8 Alalakh and Ugarit have foundered and none has found general acceptance. No such names have been found among the Amarna letters, which give the names of many rulers and high officials in Palestine. There is no reason from cuneiform material to question the view that the worship of Yahweh began in Sinai or southern Palestine in the very late Bronze Age and spread northwards around the turn of the millennium. Surprisingly, however, most scholars accept a close com-

See Reallexikon, s.v. "Jau-bi'di", and s.v. "Izri-Yau", and Dalley, "Foreign chariotry and cavalry in the armies of Tiglath-Pileser III and Sargon II", Iraq 47 (1985), p. 32. 5 G. R. Driver, in his Appendix to S. R. Driver, The Book of Genesis (12th edn, London, 1926), pp. 440-4, thought the Assyrians did not recognize Yau as a divine element in names because it usually lacked the divine determinative; and that where is is found, the text would have been written by a Jewish scribe. 6 S. M. Dalley and J. N. Postgate, Cunetform Textsfrom Nimrud III, Tabletsfrom Fort Shalmaneser (Oxford, 1984), Kubaba-ilaya and Kubaba-suri, Si'-ramu and Si'qatar; Ubru-Allaya in nos 47 and 48. 7 See H.-P. Miiller, "Gab es in Ebla ein GottJa?", ZeitschriftfiirAssyriologie70 (1980), pp. 70-92. 8 F. Pomponio, review of S. Dalley et al., The Old Babylonian tabletsfrom Tell al Rimah, in Oriens Antiquus 16 (1977), pp. 335-6.

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parison of Yahweh's imagery with that of El and Bacal in the Bronze Age myths from Ugarit.9 The Old Testament tends to promote the view that Yahweh was worshipped solely by the people of Israel and Judah, largely through the institution of the Covenant, which E. W. Nicholson10 and others maintain cannot have been earlier than the 8th century. Quite outside the scope of the Old Testament lies the question whether at that time Yahweh was worshipped beyond the borders of those kingdoms."1 There is indeed cuneiform evidence indicating that he was worshipped in inland Syria in the 8th century B.C. In 738 B.C. the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III took over 19 districts of the powerful kingdom of Hamath on the Orontes River in North Syria, because they had defected to a king named AzriYau. The incident is described in several versions of the Assyrian records. One of the tablets which described the event was broken, but was restored to read: "Izri-Yau the Judean". The word for Judean was clear, and Izri-Yau was taken to be a phonetic variant of Azri-Yau. Azri-Yau was recognized as equivalent to the biblical Azariah, which is given as a form of the name of king Uzziah of Judah. There were, however, a number of difficulties over this interpretation. First, it seemed much more likely that the northern kingdom of Israel would be allied with Hamath, rather than the southern kingdom of Judah. Second, however hard the chronologers squeezed their evidence, it was difficult to keep Uzziah alive after 740 B.C.; in fact, it was just about impossible to have Uzziah on the throne ofJudah in 738. Third, the variant IzriYau for Azri-Yau was not easily explained away. Then in 1974 a brilliant piece of research by Nadav Na'aman produced the following results. The one fragment which seemed to name Izri-Yau as "The Judean" was reassigned and joined to another fragment. The newly joined text was then dated to the
9 J. Day, God's Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 179-80. 10 God and his People (Oxford, 1986), p. 188. 1 S. R. Driver, "Recent theories on the origin and nature of the tetragrammaton", Studia Biblica (Oxford, 1885), pp. 1-20, reviewed this question in order to refute the argument of Friedrich Delitzsch, that Yahweh was originally an Akkadian god, and to air the view of A. H. Sayce, that Yahweh was a Hittite god. Most of the names which he adduces (p. 2) do not definitely bear a Yahweh element.

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following, 7th century, probably to the reign of Sennacherib; and the name Izri-Yau, which had been restored in part, was shown to be differently read as: "of my frontier and Judah", not as a personal name at all. In other words, the individual cuneiform signs had been read correctly but grouped by hyphenation wrongly.12 The fragment probably refers to Hezekiah, although this is not certain.'3 The former and the latter readings with restorations can be juxtaposed as follows: [ .... i]z-ri-ia-u kuria-u-da-a-a [mi-i]s-ri-ia u kuria-u-da-a-a. The vital hyphen is entirely a matter for the reader's judgement; there is nothing in the text, not even spacing, to show where syllables should be joined. The results of all this detail are twofold: there was a ruler named Azri-Yau who was allied with Hamath and who did not rule Israel orJudah; and we are left without a state to assign to the ruler AzriYau.14 Although the problem of a so-called "Izri-Yau the Judean" in that fragmentary text has been solved satisfactorily, a number of modern historians continue to make a muddle over the episode, partly because of the unspoken assumption that a person with a Yahweh-bearing name is automatically considered to belong to Israel and Judah, and so it is impossible to write a history of ancient Israel without bringing in this ruler Azri-Yau, who has nothing to do with Israel or Judah. At this point, another horrible possibility for confusion arisesand it is this which has tripped those writers of history who had cleared the first hurdle. Aramaic inscriptions from Sam'al, which lies in Turkey near the border with Syria, sometimes refer to Sam'al with another name prefixed, written as y'dy. There is no evidence to show how this word was vocalized, for it does not occur in cuneiform sources; and its second consonant, aleph, is different from that of Judah, which is an h. The place-name is given simply as Sam'al in cuneiform sources. Unfortunately, however, there were some speculative suggestions to vocalizey'dy asyaudi, ignoring

12 See J. D. Hawkins, Reallexikon der Assyriologie, s.v. "Izriyau", and s.v. "Hamath". 13 R. LesestiickeI (2nd ed., Rome, 1979), p. 134. Borger, Babylonisch-assyrische 14 See also Weippert, Reallexikon der Assyriologie, s.v. "Israel" and "Judah" 2e, p. 205a.

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numerous other possibilities.15 Some historians, who realized that Azri-Yau the ruler named as leader of Syrian rebels in TiglathPileser's campaign in 738 could not be Uzziah of Judah, did not understand that kurYaudaya in the rehyphenated fragments was no longer relevant to the matter of the Assyrian enemy Azri-Yau, and seized upon Sam'al as a likely home for the ruler Azri-Yau. Of recent historians, J. Bright, in his revised History of Israel (3rd edn, London, 1981), continues to maintain that we have an AzriYau of Yaudi who is Uzziah of Judah in 738 BC; and H. W. F. Saggs, The Might that was Assyria (London, 1984), simply says that Azri-Yau of Yaudi has been identified by some as king of Judah. S. Herrmann's revised History of Israel (London, 1981) = Geschichte Israels(2nd edn., Munich, 1980) says that Azri-Yau of Yaudi in 738 BC should not be identified with Azariah (Uzziah) of Judah, but goes on to say that he was king of Yaudi in North Syria. H. Donner, writing in J. H. Hayes and J. M. Miller (ed.), Israelite and Judaean History (London, 1977), pp. 424-5, writes: "One cannot exclude the possibility that his [Azri-Yau's] country was the north Syrian state of Ya'udi-Sam'al... A king named Azriau, however, is not attested there." J. A. Soggin, A History of Israel (London, 1984), discusses the episode as though the old view, that Azri-Yau is biblical Uzziah, is still possible though unlikely, and then adds, as an afterthought, that Na'aman seems to have re-attributed the episode to the time of Hezekiah. The only historian who rejects the relevance of the whole episode for biblical history is Y. Aharoni, whose Land of the Bible (London), revised in 1979 by A. F. Rainey, made the clear but undetailed and dismissive statement that "the assumption that Uzziah's preeminence is also demonstrated by his leading a coalition of western states in taking a stand against Tiglath-pileser III in 738 B.C. has now been refuted" (p. 347). To go back briefly to the possibility raised by Donner: in fact, by a remarkable piece of good fortune, we can absolutely exclude the possibility that Azri-Yau ruled Sam'al in 738. The Aramaic inscriptions of Bar-rakkab (or Bar-rakib) king of Sam'al are concerned with the reign of Tiglath-pileser III. Bar-rakkab's father
15 See Reallexikon, s.v. "Jaudu", and Hawkins, CambridgeAncient History III/1, p. 397. Cuneiform spellings of Judah are now collected by R. Zadok, Repertoire des Textes Cuneiformes8 (Tiibingen, 1985). Geographique

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Panammu was king of Y'DY-Sam'al before him, and had been put on the throne, after an outbreak of violent trouble, by Tiglathpileser. Panammu had been on the throne for long enough to bring the country out of hard times into prosperity, and had been proud to serve alongside the Assyrian king in the Assyrian army. For his faithful service and valour he was granted towns and lands adjacent to his kingdom by the victorious Tiglath-pileser around 740 BC after the three-year siege of Arpad. Panammu was killed in action, still serving the Assyrian king, during a campaign in the vicinity of Damascus which took place in 733/732, and his body was taken back to Assyria for an honourable burial. His son Bar-rakkab followed in his footsteps as a staunchly pro-Assyrian king, and he boasted that he had "run at the wheel of my lord the king of Assyria". Thus we know for certain that Panammu was the proAssyrian ruler of Y'DY-Sam'al in 738 B.C. and we can absolutely exclude the possibility that the anti-Assyrian Azri-Yau was king in the same place. So where did Azri-Yau rule? Not in Hamath itself, for the ruler at that time is known to have been one Eni-ilu, probably up until about 738 B.C. It has been suggested that he ruled the kingdom of a small state thought to lie somewhere Hatarikka/Hazrak,16 between Aleppo and Hamath or in the vicinity of Damascus,17 perhaps more than 150 miles away from Sam'al (with which it had no known ties), and it may at this time have been no more than one of the 19 districts of Hamath which opposed Tiglath-pileser in 738. It cannot have been less than 250 miles away from Samaria, and the powerful kingdoms of Hamath and Damascus lay between it and Israel. Thus it was by no means a near neighbour of Israel. The interesting fact which emerges from so much muddle and confusion is this: that there was a ruler in North Syria in 738 who bore a name compounded with Yahweh. Since a single example is never a firm basis for deduction, we shall proceed to our second example. At the end of Shalmaneser V's reign, perhaps in 722 B.C., Samaria fell to the Assyrians. His successor Sargon II was not in direct line of succession and usurped the throne of Assyria. Soon after his accession, two terrible events took place: the Assyrian
16 Hawkins, Reallexikon, s.v. "Izri-Yau", and s.v. "Luhuti" for Hatarikka as a part of Hamath. 17 See now S. Parpola, StateArchivesof Assyria I (Helsinki, 1987), p. 134, n. 171.

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army was heavily defeated at Der, east of the Tigris; and there was a mutiny in the heart of Assyria which Sargon publicly admitted, and said he put down only with the greatest difficulty. Hardly surprising is it, in such circumstances, that Samaria scarcely considered itself subject to Assyria, threw off the recently imposed yoke of vassaldom, and joined an anti-Assyrian coalition which was led by Hamath under its king Yau-bi'di whose capital city lay about 220 miles away from Samaria as the crow flies. The coalition between Israel and Hamath was probably active around 720/719 B.C., possibly longer. Scholarly comment on this incident has mainly been restricted to the part played by Israel. Little notice has been paid to the fact that the leader of Hamath has a name compounded with Yahweh, although both E. Meyer and W. F. Albright thought that he must have been an Israelite abroad, a view also followed tentatively by Cogan and Tadmor.'8 If we ignore the argument which is under debate, that all Yahweh-bearing names belong to Israelites, the second example reinforces the first, and suggests that Yahweh was worshipped in North Syria in the mid to late 8th century. A third example comes not from cuneiform sources but from the OT from the time of king David, when Toi or Tou the king of Hamath sent his son, named both Joram and Hadoram, to congratulate David.19 Unless the boy changed his name to Joram when he went to Jerusalem purely as a mark of respect for local custom, we may either agree with Malamat ([n. 18], pp. 6-7) that Hamathites adopted Yahweh-worship from Jerusalem when they came into Solomon's sphere of influence and then paid tribute to David, or we may suppose that the worship of Yahweh was already indigenous in Hamath. The kings of Hamath in the time of Shalmaneser III were neoHittites, Irhuleni and his son Urtatamis, but neo-Hittite inscriptions of this time indicate that a Semitic goddess Ba'alat, pronounced Pahalatis, was the national deity (Hawkins [n. 15], p. 396). In view of this, there is no need to posit a change in religious
18 See A. Malamat, "Aspects of the Foreign Policies of David and Solomon", JNES 22 (1963), p. 7, n. 27; M. Cogan and H. Tadmor, II Kings (Garden City, New York, 1988), p. 166. Analysis of the name to avoid Yau as a divine element by E. Lipiiiski, VT 21 (1971), pp. 371-3, has no factual basis. 19 2 Sam. viii 9 and 1 Chron. xviii 10. The interchange Had/Jo confirms that Yau is a divine, not a verbal element here.

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beliefs when the dynasty changed from neo-Hittites to Arameans under Zakkur (or Zakir) in the mid 8th century. At this point we need to ask what implications are latent in the choice of a god as a name element for a king at this period. As far as the evidence goes, it seems to show clearly that the king's name uses either the national, patron deity as the divine element (Bacal in Tyre, Chemosh in Moab, Qaus in Edom, Assur in Assyria and Marduk in Babylon) or the name of another major deity whose worship was important in that country, such as Nergal or Nabu in Babylon, or Sin in Assyria. We still do not know for certain whether a man would often adopt a new and more appropriate name when he became crown prince or king; but it is extremely unlikely that he would include, in his name as king, a god who was neither his country's patron deity nor even worshipped there as a major god. In other words, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, in the late 8th century both before and after the fall of Samaria, Yahweh was worshipped as a major god in Hamath and its vicinity. Could Azri-Yau and Yau-bi'di both be Israelite adventurers who had seized power in two separate Syrian states? There would be no certain parallels. The only possible one is Yamani of Ashdod, sometimes interpreted as "the Ionian" or "the Greek", but likely to be a Semite who bore the same name as the recent Minister for Oil in Saudi Arabia.20 With no certain parallel nor any allusion to such an event, neither in the Old Testament nor in Greek traditions, this possibility should probably be discarded. Cogan and Tadmor ([n. 18], p. 166) maintain that Azri-Yau must be an Israelite name because the non-Israelite pronunciation would be expressed with d, not z. In fact, the Assyrians at that time were inconsistent in their spelling, as can be seen from the alternation hiin-za-ni and hi-in-da-na, a place on the middle Euphrates (Parpola [n. 17]. p. 237); and in personal names they seem to have written d always in idri, but z always in azrilazuri, etc., although there are too few examples to formulate a firm rule. Another alternative is to imagine both rulers as men who had worked for decades as chariotry experts for the very top people in the royal court, and eventually were promoted to power in an internal coup. I have
See K. Tallqvist, Assyrian Personal Names (Helsingfors, 1914), s.v., and H. Tadmor, "The campaigns of Sargon II of Assur", Journal of CuneiformStudies 12 (1958), p. 80, n. 217.
20

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recently shown from neo-Assyrian administrative texts found at Nimrud that Israelites from Samaria worked for the Assyrian king Sargon II in the late 8th century as highly trusted mercenaries skilled in chariotry (Dalley, n. 4); and it is possible that they did the same for rulers in the area of Hamath. If this hypothesis were correct, we would have to suppose that usurpation by a highly placed Israelite resident abroad happened in two different Syrian states, Hamath and (?)Hatarikka, and that neither ruler saw fit to take on a new name proclaiming his adopted nation's divine patronage. Both of these hypothetical events would have taken place before the conquest of Samaria displaced a large number of Israelites, and so cannot be linked to that event. Moreover, none of the 8th-century prophets refers to any such events. These are significant difficulties. It is simpler to take the explanation that Azri-Yau and Yau-bi'di were indigenous rulers of two north Syrian states where Yahweh was worshipped as a major god. A close relationship did exist between the northern kingdom of Israel and Hamath in the late 8th century: they fought together against Sargon II as allies, and men of Hamath were deported to Samaria (2 Kings xvii 24), rather surprisingly in view of that alliance. But those two episodes cannot, of course, account for earlier kings of Hamath using names compounded with Yahweh. When Sennacherib's rab-saqeh addressed the people of Jerusalem in 701 BC (2 Kings xviii 34; Isa. xxxvi 19) he said: "Hath any of the gods of the nations delivered at all his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and of Arpad?" As Cogan and Tadmor have pointed out ([n. 18], p. 233), Sennacherib is referring to victories long past, for Hamath was defeated 19 years before, and Arpad 39 years previously. This would have been obvious to the rab-sdqeh'saudience. If we take the words as they stand-and Cogan and Tadmor among many others accept them-they do indeed imply that, up until 720 and 740 B.C. Hamath and Arpad respectively had depended on Yahweh for their delivrance, and he had failed them. Of course, this does not mean that the nature ofJudah's religion was identical with that of Hamah and Arpad; the Sefire inscriptions from Arpad name Elyon the Jebusite god of Jerusalem after Hadad of Aleppo, the Seven Gods and El. But the words of the rab-sdqeh confirm that the Hamathites of the 8th century worshipped a god in common with the Israelites, and that this was a fact well known to the Assyrians.

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There is some evidence from North-West Arabia which may indicate a continuing connexion between the worship of Yahweh and the religion of the Hamath area during the Persian period. 2 Kings xvii 30, tells us that the chief deity of Hamath was Ashima, and there is now independent evidence of her existence from the oasis city of Tayma. Two Aramaic inscriptions on stone are now known from there, the one discovered by the explorer Charles Doughty in the last century and the other only recently discovered and published.21 Neither one mentions Yahweh, but they both name Ashima, the deity of Hamath. (The newly found inscription corrects a reading on the older stone from Asherah to Ashima.) It is almost certain that Tayma was inhabited by a number of Jews or Yahweh-worshippers at that time, as were several neighbouring oasis towns; this has long been the deduction drawn, both from a Qumran fragment concerning the healing of Nabonidus by a Jewish exorcist in Arabia, and from early Islamic sources which show that those oasis towns which are named as conquered by Nabonidus in his Harran inscription were occupied chiefly by Jews in the time of Muhammed.22 At Elephantine in the Persian period offerings lists show that Yahweh was worshipped there together with Asham-Bethel, possibly a form of Ashima.23 In view of these somewhat indirect indications that Yahweh was worshipped with Ashima, the reading of Amos viii 14 as "Ashima of Samaria" rather than as "sin of Samaria" may gain credence, for it was mainly disfavoured on the grounds that Ashima was unknown in Israel.24 Two suggestions may be made as a result of this conclusion. The first is that it provides a possible route for the transmission of Ugaritic imagery to the Sinaitic god Yahweh in Jerusalem; the territory of Hamath certainly stretched to the coast at Simirra, for that town gave its name to a province of Hamath in the time of Tiglath21 A. Livingstone et al., "Taima': recent soundings and new inscribed material", Atlal 7 (1983), pp. 108-11, with bibliography. 22 C. J. Gadd, "The Harran Inscriptions of Nabonidus", Anatolian Studies 8 (1958), pp. 80ff. 23 E. G. Kraeling, The BrooklynMuseumAramaic Papyri (New Haven, Conn., and London 1953), pp. 87ff.; see also J. A. Soggin, Introductionto the Old Testament (revised edn, London, 1976), p. 486. 24 H. W. Wolff, BiblischerKommentar,Amos, (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1969), p. 372. I am grateful to Dr G. I. Davies for drawing my attention to this point at the SOTS meeting.

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Pileser III. The second is that the dilemma faced by Hezekiah and was one to which a covenant, reinforcing expressed by the rab-saqeh a special relationship with Yahweh, could have provided a solution: Yahweh had been powerless to save his worshippers in Arpad and Hamath because they worshipped other gods too, but he would save Judah if they worshipped him alone. Finally, we should look at how the close relationship between the two widely separate kingdoms, Israel and Hamath, might have arisen. We have already looked with scepticism upon the theory that Israelite adventurers seized power so far from home. Another possibility is to look at the period before the formation of Judah and Israel. When Yahweh moved northwards from Sinai, he was assimilated with El. The Assyrians thought of Yahweh as El (which for them may have been a title for the head of an "old" generation of pantheon), and give a variant of Yau-bi)di's name as El-bi'di. The long and complex process whereby the Hebrews entered Palestine from Transjordan, bringing the worship of Yahweh with them, is represented in very simple terms in the OT. It would not be contrary to current thinking to suppose that some bands of Hebrews failed to enter Palestine and continued their migration northwards.25 If so, we may see the pattern of the 12 tribes as a tidy scheme imposed upon a less orderly reality. Alternatively, the cause of Yahweh's worship in Hamath may lie in the expansion of Israel under Jeroboam II (c. 782-748). Most commentators, however, declare as corrupt 2 Kings xiv 28, and there seems to be fairly general acceptance that the border of Israel did not extend beyond Lebo-Hamath, at the southern border of the maximum kingdom of Hamath where it meets the territory of Damascus.26 Lebo-Hamath lies some 400 km. south of the city of Hamath, although from its name one tends to think of it as closely associated. It would be rash to press for one or other of these possibilities without some more evidence. But one clear and important conclusion can be drawn. When a cuneiform record or an Aramaic

25 R. de Vaux, The Early History of Israel (London, 1978) = Histoire ancienne d'Israel (Paris, 1971). M. Weippert, "The Israelite 'Conquest' and the evidence from Transjordan", in F. M. Cross (ed.), Symposia (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 15-34. 26 Y. Aharoni, Land of the Bible (2nd edn, London 1979), pp. 72-3.

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ostracon found outside the Hebrew homeland mentions a person whose name is compounded with Yahweh, and who lives outside Palestine and has no gentilic information attached to him, we should not assume that the man came from Israel or Judah. He may come from one of several cities in Syria where people worshipped Yahweh as a major god in the 8th century BC.