A Reaper's Plea for His Cloak

A harvest worker says his cloak was taken after he finished his work. So, in this text, he appeals to the governor.

Scripture: If you take your neighbor’s garment as collateral, you shall restore it to him before the sun goes down,

That verse sits among rules protecting widows, the fatherless and the poor. A garment kept as a loan guarantee was one of those concerns.

In 1960, Joseph Naveh discovered an ostracon at Mesad Hashavyahu: a piece of pottery with writing on it. It lay under the floor of a room beside the guardhouse and gate.

It stands about twenty centimetres tall and sixteen and a half wide, with fourteen visible lines in the old Paleo-Hebrew script. One source puts it in the seventh century BCE, and scholars infer Judaean control of the fortress.

Scripture: Then comes his plea.

How does this meet the passage? The worker appeals against a seizure he says is a theft and, according to Wikipedia, by implication the law about a garment taken as collateral. He never cites it, though one source says it would have been commonly known by rulers and peasants alike.

Plenty is debated. Scholars have called the text a letter, a legal document, a petition, even a poem. Some read in it the earliest non-biblical mention of the Sabbath; others dispute that. And the damaged lower lines are partly reconstructed.

Today the ostraca from the site are in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Wikipedia counts six inscribed Hebrew ostraca recovered there.

The sources don't say how the governor answered. But a field hand's plea, written on an ostracon, suggests one garment mattered to him. When something of yours is taken unfairly, who do you turn to? May the Lord Jesus Christ be with you today. Follow the page for the next find.