One big family?: a quantitative look at recurring names on Judahite private Jar-handle impressions

This paper examines the phenomenon of recurring names on Judahite private jar-handle impressions. The large number of recurring names in this corpus has been noted as early as 1941 by David Diringer, who proposed that many stamp-bearers belonged to the same family. This phenomenon has rarely been discussed in subsequent literature, however. I offer a new statistical analysis, showing that the high recurrence of names among the private stamps cannot be due to mere chance and should rather be explained in terms of genealogical relations. These relations span at least two generations and involve between 30% and 60% of the stamp bearers. These results have two main implications. First, they vindicate Diringer’s intuitions about the importance and genealogical nature of recurring names among the jar-handle impressions. Second, they suggest that the private jar-handles phenomenon probably had a longer time span than often assumed, lasting several decades rather than a handful of years before the Assyrian invasion of 701 BCE.