If wine is the answer, what’s the question?
IN America, the post office is known as US Snail but in Israel, the situation has become ridiculous.
A letter to a friend imploring wine has finally been found 2,600 years after the fact. In 600 B.C. in present-day Israel, a soldier named Hananyahu sent his friend a simple request: send more wine.
Hananyahu – no relation of Natanyahu, who was also a wine-fancier – was probably a soldier in a military outpost called the Fortress of Arad which belonged to the then Kingdom of Judah.
It was a boring job which might explain the wine. In truth, his superiors thought he was something of a slacker – they’d noticed that camels could work for ten days without drinking but old Hananyahu could drink for ten days without working.
Actually, it was an unfair assessment. He preferred wine to war but who wouldn’t? He was brave in the sense that he was the only one who knew he was afraid and he had his own golden rule: he never shared a foxhole with someone who was braver than himself. He knew that out there in Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, who was embittered by his five-syllable name, was plotting the destruction of Judah. And the five-syllable-sounding King of Babylon knew he would win one day because he also knew that those who beat their swords into ploughshares would, one day plough for those who didn’t.
But his superiors must have frowned on his lifestyle. Which explains the invisible ink.
You see, pickled and well preserved as he was, Hananyahu was nothing if not crafty.
He wrote his eloquent, threeword plea on a piece of pottery that archaeologists found in 1965. For years, biblical scholars and researchers have studied the front side of the ink-inscribed pottery shard, known as an ostracon, which was commonly used to write receipts, lists or even letters. In short, they used more pot than not.
They deciphered the Hebrew words about money and Yahweh, which the man had sent to his friend Elyashiv, but it wasn’t until recently that they came across an appeal for alcohol written on the back side. That’s because for nearly 50 years archaeologists thought the back of the ostracon was blank, when really the ink was invisible.
Now can you grasp the fiendish ingenuity of the soldier who’d merely wanted a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and no one else. Even the loaf was apparently, negotiable.
Now, using multispectral imaging technology, researchers have unveiled three lines of words hidden on the ancient text message. These words were obviously meant to be hidden from the eyes of his superiors.
“Getting a letter from Hananyahu after 2,600 years, it’s something that gave me chills,” said Shira Goldvin, a doctoral student in applied mathematics at Tel Aviv University and an author of the study. “I was really surprised to see it.”
Alas, poor Hananyahu! 15 years after he posted his heartfelt plea, a wrathful Nebuchadnezzar fell on Jerusalem like an avenging angel and smote his enemies and destroyed the city’s Temple.
And Hananyahu never received his wine either so he must have died heartbroken.
Whoever said the pen was mightier than the sword had obviously never heard of Nebuchadnezzar.