About: Yahad Ostracon

The Yahad Ostracon is a controversial ostracon (text-bearing potsherd) that was found at the ruins of Qumran in 1996. The editors who published the text claimed that it contained the Hebrew word yahad (יחד). This word is also used in a number of the Dead Sea Scrolls, where it has usually been translated as "community", and is generally taken to be a self-reference to the group responsible for the scrolls in which it appears (and, by extension, the corpus as a whole). The presence of this unusual term in both the scrolls (found in the nearby caves) and on the ostracon (found at the ruins themselves) would connect the scrolls to the settlement at Qumran.