Jewish Ossuaries and the Burial of Trauma

Jewish ossuaries were limestone, roughly-femur-sized bone boxes used to hold the desiccated remains of people around the turn of the Common Era. They are scattered almost exclusively throughout the tombs of Jerusalem’s best people. They first appear in burial chambers around the time of a golden age under Herod the Great, and they fade from the historical record around the time Jerusalem’s Temple burns. Roman legions sieged and then marched through the monumental architecture that Herod’s favor with Augustus had bought. Juxtaposing these monuments are ossuaries, small, largely unadorned, stating only names or blessings. Even the ossuary of Simon the Builder is plain, blank and clean although irregularly hewn; others, however, are ornamental. In this almost-century, ossuaries were used side-by-side with charnel pits and coffins, appearing in elite tombs almost ex nihilo from the city’s tohu of multiculturalism. Ossuaries are material representations of the Jewish relationship with the Roman Empire during their time. This is, naturally, almost all that researchers of ossuaries can agree on. The roiling contradictions and disagreements in scholarship over basic questions of ossuary use and purpose are, in my mind, parallel to arguments about larger questions relating to the passage of life and death and history.

This paper explores the complexities of Jewish ossuary research and the phenomenon’s historical end. I report on a trend within a sample of Jerusalem ossuaries that seems to indicate another contradiction within this phenomenon. In this sample, ossuary inscription is ‘hurried’ and, in those with hurried inscriptions, we are likely to see anomalies in the burials’ preparation and use of inhumation. I finally offer speculation about why such a trend might exist, an answer that itself enters into conversations with more universal questions about memory and respect for the dead.