Listen: In the year 3000, my uncle’s corpse will be exhumed. Future archaeologists will ponder the desiccated remains of a human man in his sixties from the late twentieth century, found at the same, standard depth beneath the ground as the surrounding burials in a cemetery in formerly Waco, Texas, placed in a metal vehicle. The paint will long have dissolved in the slightly acidic and moist underground conditions, and only chips of cerulean recovered from crevices within the metal frame will reveal its colour. The canvas hood and leather seats will be rotted away, but the fragile finger bones will still be wrapped around the wheel. The image of a long-extinct animal known as a ‘horse’ adorns the unusual topless car’s front, a leaping figurine from a bygone era. They will marvel at this primitive form of transportation being the casing for this corpse, and equally puzzle as to why the vehicle is vertical, with the headlights pointed away from the earth above.

Naturally, they will say, this has to do with this human male’s religious beliefs in life, and from it we can extrapolate much about the culture. Though an unusual burial for the period, it is part of a larger trend of people being buried in car-like encasements. To support this, they will produce the crumbling images of children with racecar coffins,[1] an article from The Paper of Record,[2] a workshop named “Cruisin’ Caskets,”[3] and anecdotes of men in their forties who die in sports cars they do not know how to operate.[4] They will astutely note that many ballads from this time in history use vehicles and the paths they travel on as metaphors for the moral outlook on one’s life. Thus, they will hypothesise, laterally placed car-like encasements indicate that those within saw life as a highway, whereas this unusual example placed vertically indicates the deceased was on the highway to hell. Based on these findings, they will speculate, anthropologists should expect to find door knobs in or on some burial containers, since their residents must have believed themselves to be knocking on heaven’s door.

***

My father’s casket was oak. Thus, it will decay long before any extraterrestrial encounters it. Its rounded top was polished well, and the grain of the wood streamlined, like the current of an artist’s river, only aesthetically pleasing knot-whirlpools preserved. The steel poles for pallbearers, carefully bolted into the wood, dully shone in the fluorescent lighting of the showroom. The casket salesman told us the legend of this box: the last one in stock, made from wood reclaimed from New England buildings constructed in the Gilded Age that now impede modernity, far more precious than the price would indicate, et cetera. I was struck by the storied nature of it, despite most of it probably being hogwash. Like a good American of Irish stock, I love a story or a scam, preferably both when possible.

I jokingly asked the salesman if he had any used caskets or rentals available. After all, it was just for a brief show. My joke elicited no laughter in the funeral home. So much for putting the “fun” in “funeral.”

We selected the oak one, my mother and sister and I, despite the fact that he requested pine. Pine was cheapest, in his mind, and, according to him, he wouldn’t be there to enjoy the benefits of a particularly nice casket. I still feel slightly odd about compromising on his burial request, but, to be fair, the oak one looked nicer and we stuck with the unassuming wooden theme. He used to joke and say that if we disobeyed his interment wishes that he’d come back and haunt us, but I still haven’t seen his ghost.

***

Free from the tethers of the North American tree as principal building material, the ancient craftspeople who made Jewish ossuaries dabbled in limestone.[5] A common sedimentary rock in and around Jerusalem at the turn of the common era, it composed a majority of building materials in the construction of a sort-of restored Jerusalem under Herod the Great.[6] Around this same time, cultists in the desert and scholars in their communities arrived at the conclusion that limestone was purer than other rocks.[7] I’m fairly certain its preponderance informed that decision (as though it were made by committee), and that the democratisation of rock and religion go hand in hand,[8] but far be it from me to ascribe economic influence to divine revelation.

As a general term, ossuary can refer to any number of kinds of inhumations involving bones. Catacombs, some mass graves, charnel pits, those spooky European churches with femur walls and skull sconces, all of those are technically ossuaries. That’s because the word ossuary comes from the Latin verb ossilegium, meaning “to gather bones.” Another translation could be “to select bones,” and, in some cases, this is more appropriate. Instead of collecting all of an individual’s bones, a skull, a tooth, or a pelvis can become metonymous, taking on the power of an individual’s full interred essence. Indiginous American bundle burials, and the French catacombs, are examples of this sort of thing.

Jewish ossuaries may have originated from this kind of metonymy, as one of the earliest finds that could be considered ossilegium from the appropriate period is simply a skull in a box, found in the tombs of a springfed community on the edge of the Dead Sea. [9]

One of the earlier literary references to ossilegium appears in the Torah. Joseph, dying in Egypt, commands his family to ascend with his bones from Egypt.[10] Jacob, too, is said to have been asked to be buried with his family in the Holy Land, out of Egypt, though as a primary (rather than secondary) burial, his body preserved through mummification and allegedly carried out of Egypt.[11] These two figures’ mode of rest speaks to the emphasis on family seen in the history of Jewish burial; it also prefigures, in some ways, the preoccupation with the gathering of bones during the Second Temple period.

***

It’s astounding how obeying the patriarchs is something that gets ignored when they make obstinate requests. My father, for example, at first said he never wanted a feeding tube. That the moment he was unable to eat naturally, that meant G-d had ordained it his time to pass on. Since that was what he said when he could still speak, I prepared myself for the prospect of seeing the strongest man I ever knew starve to death. Not an appealing thought. Eventually, he changed his mind. He relented, I think, because my mother made it clear that she wasn’t on board with that approach.

He wanted his body donated to science, too, and his organs taken for donation. We didn’t follow those requests, either. The body of my father, as it lay there in that hospital room at 2am, surrounded by its owner’s family, disinvested of its ghost, could have been divided up and helped with healing or health science. I quite like the imagery, my father’s physical form being a source of life for others, or, at least, sight or something sensory like that. My father’s eyes could see the world from another perspective, the empathy he expressed in life realised bodily. But, alas, degenerative illness cut out those who would have themselves cut up; at least, in this case they did. Still, we jealously guarded his body against marauding scientists seeking samples.

***

When scholars dissect the ossuaries as a phenomenon, they have a tendency to categorise, each for their own purpose. They all agree that Jewish ossuaries store bones.[12] They are usually made of stone, soft limestone, to be specific.[13] Almost all preserved ossuaries are decorated[14] – after all, until recently, archaeologists and grave robbers (which is to say the same thing twice) gave little thought to what was ordinary. A distinct minority of this group are inscribed in some way, roughly 25ish% of most ossuary collections.[15]

Even the ossuary of Simon the Builder, monumental architect of one of Jerusalem’s new gates during the Herodian period, is buried in an unassuming stone box.[16]

Make no mistake, these are boxes, rectangular versions of the ones you kept folded and hidden in the back of the closet or beside the hot water heater when you moved a lot in your twenties. Actually, the average volume of the two isn’t that much different.[17] Some scholars think that their size and design are based on the boxes many Roman legionaries and their families kept at the foot of their beds when stationed at some distant garrison, ready to move from one place to the next efficiently.[18]

***

My mother looked through the cedar chest at the foot of her bed for photos of my father for the obligatory funeral slideshow. The box is long and deep, perfect for storing quilts and a wedding dress, or a body curled upon itself. When opened, it smells of woods and balsam, not-quite-aftershave and better-than-cologne. Like the kind my father wore only to church, weddings, and funerals. The womb-like, pale-red-and-orange-punctuated-by-pink wood flows and whorls like a river, and the knots are eyes staring at shins. When they could stare, that is, as the flat top of the box has become the dropping point for the distruss acquired over the course of a lifetime deposited in a home, stagnant, for twenty years, and thus blocks their view.

But I still feel their gaze, so, during this mourning period, I compulsively organise and clean my parents’ things. This will eventually cause my mother stress, and she will fear I am judging her, then be flustered when she inevitably can’t find one thing or another. It’s because I move it, usually. She’ll acknowledge her somewhat haphazard stacking-sorting that peppers flat surfaces where they can be found with a slight apology, and I think she almost means it. Not enough to change, but enough to feel some judgement when others are present. Now she is alone, on a farm far from the end of town, with only the eyes of God upon her.

We had several days to hunt for such photos, which was good, since my father was the family photographer and not a subscriber to the collecting lifestyle that my mother embraced. We had a few, maybe five, photographs of him in his younger years hiding at the bottom of a filing cabinet in a closet in the room that formerly housed our desktop computer. In that chest, my mother found a few from their dating years, and those of their wedding. After that, within albums of childless vacation folios, from what my mother called the BCE, Before Children Era, there were landscapes, Cherokee dances, slain deer, and my mother, but perhaps two of our quarry.

We had plenty of time to prepare for my father’s funeral because it was one of the last before the end of the world. You see, in a moment of serendipity, my father had died the evening of the 14th of March in 2020. That was the day Texas finally initiated lockdowns and the day before a moratorium was placed on funerals. Just like in life, my father was timely in death. The funeral home, despite the late hour of my call to them from the sterile, dimly-lit hospital hallway, was grateful for the timing. They had heard whispers, they said, of what was coming down.

Right in the nick of time, they said.

***

It seems important to me to note the temporal dependence of Jewish ossuaries before going any further into their use and the disagreements that arise about that use. Jewish ossuaries appear in the archaeological record around 20 BCE and end their classical period by 70 CE.[19] In those ninety years, Jerusalem was a hotbed of economic growth. The stone mason guilds began to develop factories to create pieces for the monumental building projects financed by Rome.[20] Herod is, in part, called Great because of his ability to suck up to Rome during this period despite having just demonstrated Palestine’s unwillingness to be under any external, non-Jewish rule. The Tomb of Zechariah and Herod’s Mausoleum stand as testaments to their artistic talents, talents that can only be fostered with a particular kind of wealth.[21] As the money rolled in from the Roman means of production,[22] the families of those in power naturally took their fair share, tolling gates and taxing goods.

Jerusalem, the city of the crossroads between Europe and Africa, was also a tohu of multiculturalism. Roman imperial influence was felt with increasing heaviness during this period, culminating in the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. As Jerusalem’s temple burned, it is not hard to imagine the last ossuaries, the ones of those killed in the early stages of the conflict, being interred by heavily conflicted families. The ideological reactions to imperialism – nationalism and assimilation – had developed into some of their most extreme forms by the time Rome felt it necessary to lay siege to the city. Assassinations and protest, talk of nationalism and prophecy, wandering messiahs, all threatened Roman hegemony. As such, it was essential for any people, but especially the Jews of the time, to somehow accommodate themselves to Hellenistic ways, the alternative being isolation from the stream of civilisation and brutal repression.[23]

The wealth and multiculturalism gave rise to ossuaries and very concretely influenced its use. The same primitive production centres that built columns for palatial estates were later converted to make ossuaries as the money dried up.[24] A single ossuary could cost a peasant’s wages for a week;[25] thus, those who could afford them were those capable of paying the peasantry and affording the rock-cutting of their final resting places.[26] By some estimates, only about 5% of all burials from the period are of this kind,[27] and an even smaller number of those chose to be buried in ossuaries.

The multicultural nature of the Roman legion brought with it different ways of caring for the dead, along with their travelling chests.

***

Dear reader, I have a confession to make: I have lied to you. My uncle wasn’t buried in a Mustang pointed down. That would have been more interesting than the plain pine box he was buried in, a box he chose due to its inexpensiveness. He had the money to be buried in a Mustang, but he, like my father, was rather loathe to spend.

But the story is one I’ve heard before; it’s one that I heard at church several times. It was an example of how greedy some people can be, a morality tale. One that someone had always heard about, read an article about, or had a cousin who. I guess all their social circles were small.

***

Similarly closed but equally diverse were the compilers of the Talmud, who had little to say on ossuaries. They remember ossuaries as bone boxes less than they remember the process of secondary burial. The deceased, having decayed a year and a day, would be anointed with herbs and oil; a single day of mourning was permitted as the deceased’s son, who was exempted from non-essential religious injunctions on that day, moved the bones; remains were moved in a shroud, the sheet acting as a barrier between the living and the dead. Husband and wife may be buried together, as may mother and child, even if they die at different points; otherwise, ossuaries are said to contain the remains of individuals.[28]

As of course they would – after all, only individual names are inscribed on the outside of these boxes. The writers of the Jerusalem Talmud and its Babylonian appendices, pious, would not have opened the boxes to check. When visiting an old family tomb from a few hundred years previous and finding twenty-eight limestone containers, some of which have words of rest or a single name on them, what other conclusion do you jump to?

***

But we, the impious, have opened the boxes and found them wanting. Out of a survey of nearly two hundred ossuaries, only 42% were individual burials.[29] Coupling accounts for few of these, and even that explanation is lacking, for what has the Talmud to say about two unrelated men and a child being interred together?[30] Or, for that matter, a man and his dog? Stranger still are the burials that contain incomplete remains: two skulls and one pelvis, among other bones; three femurs, one skull, and two separate vertebrae; the ossuary of two children and a teen boy, comingled. Geographically, this blending in burial seems pretty focused in Jerusalem, as most Jericoh internments have only single internments.[31]

Some have speculated that the lack of vital skeletal remains may be due to the inability of the original inter-ers to gather all the necessary bones, or from them emptying most but not all of the bones from previous burials.[32] Maybe, in the end, we are as impious as our ancestors.

***

I first encountered Jewish ossuaries during a crisis of faith in my academic future. I was Thomas, seeing the potential of humanities research and finding it unfulfilling. In a fit of existential anxiety and dread, I told my adviser that I wanted to pivot to archaeology and conclude a degree wrapped in papyrus and vellum and encase it in stone. She paused for a moment and asked if I had ever heard of Jewish ossuaries.

Her own explanation highlighted many entry points for me: the rather mysterious relationship between this mode of burial and afterlife traditions, this form’s spontaneous and seemingly unprecedented appearance, its unclear place in the context of the Second Temple cultural milieu. I went home from that meeting, energised, feeling revitalised in my fight for faith in that to which I had devoted years of my life. That evening, I got a call from my mother after her Wednesday night church service.

My father, it seems, wasn’t well, and they were going to a special doctor to find out why.

One thing that has kept me attracted to Jewish ossuaries as a focus of study is their accessibility. Everyone thinks about the end, of mortality, of what becomes of their remains. Like elephants, we are morbidly curious. So sharing with someone that, a few thousand years ago, a burial fad occurred and that we don’t really know why, and that those who wrote about it did so inaccurately, awakens within a person some kind of wonder…that things have not always been this way, that an abyss of time separates you from The Past, but also that you and those people who were interred in and around Jerusalem share some kind of uncertainty.

In a way, the uncertain past continually impinges on the present, its passage a comforting story, even though its movement, like death, is inevitable.

I personally like this uncertain quality that ossuaries have. Reading history books, it’s easy to think of these ancients in an overly reverent fashion; where they are strong and were certain in their choices leading to a better future, we are neither of those things. This may be an overly Freudian read of the situation, but it reminds me of how, in childhood, we worship the confidence of our parents, only to have that broken down and these gods become just people in our eyes as we age. Do we not grow out of this and just displace it onto our ancestors? Or is the past truly so distant and unrelatable that we have no choice but to idealise it until we look at it with a magnifying glass?

***

We buried my father with his spectacles, bifocals with a thin brass frame. We also included a pen, one of his good ones, in his breast pocket, and a handkerchief in the back of his jeans. Despite our Protestantism and Civility, we still provide goods for the dead to aid them in the next world. It flies in the face, I think, of some of what I was raised to believe about the passage to the next world, the ending of pain and the inconveniences of a ramshackle body and such.

My father was a mute, you see, in his final years. The disease robbed him of his voice, and stole his voice from our memories. I now remember more the robotic droning of the iPad my father used to communicate now than his human intonations. When without the electronics, my father kept a small pad, as he long had, in his pants pocket, and used the best breast pen he could muster from the cluttered ranch desk in the kitchen each morning to write out his thoughts. Eventually, his hand became so unsteady that one couldn’t read his writing well.

***

His slanting, folding skript, the one there at the end, was also found on ossuaries. Of the 250 inscribed ossuaries surveyed, roughly 37% are strained.[33] The words are slanted, letters doubled-over and inconsistent in size, phrases crammed into odd spaces. Not the kind of thing done by a professional scribe or by a quarryman: this was a script that slanted and swam across the stone carelessly.[34] These strained inscriptions are not like others, whose steady hand[35] and use of high holy language[36] indicates a high written proficiency. Several ossuaries, shockingly, have their design violated by the act of naming.[37] The swirling rosettes and metope frames are gouged through by chisel, and the tool’s lines lay large against the delicate backdrop.

Onomastics comprise the majority of ossuary inscriptions, but they often appear in unexpected ways. Yehohanah, daughter of Yehohanan, son of Theophilus the high priest, has the first line of her epitaph poorly, almost hurriedly inscribed.[38] Another, thrice-repeated, ossuary inscription bears marks showing the work of at least two scribes, memorialising the name and lineage of one Joseph, son of Haggai.[39] There are a whole series of ossuaries that have multiple names, unlinked by language of relation.[40]

Names are just some of what we find on ossuaries with these kinds of inscriptions. We find invocations of peace, Shalom, with lameds larger than life against small, slanting letters. Some, helpfully, declare familial association, whose son of this was or whose wife these remains belong to. Some, quite mercifully, tell us exactly what it is we are looking at, declaring the box to be a space of ossilegium. Some, too, invoke the cosmic, the magical, things that we find in so-called pagan burials throughout the Hellenistic and Roman world. [41] These texts, in particular, are noted as being “written in a careless manner, with no attention given to the appearance and proportion of letters.”[42] Another group, though, makes no sense at all: small symbols, or letters so scrambled they are unintelligible.[43] That lettered uncertainty is what made my father switch to using a robotic voice he could cause to speak for him.

***

I think the uncertainty of ossuaries is no better epitomised than in their analysis. For the past century or so, scholars have tried to speak purposefully to the situation and meaning of Jewish ossuaries.

For example, in 1994, a very valuable step forward was made in ossuary research. Levi Rahmani, Chief Curator of the Israeli Antiquities Authority, published A Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries in the Collections of the State of Israel, a wordy title for a book heavily populated by pictures. It contains, as you might guess, a catalogue of the ossuaries held by the Israeli Antiquities Authority, along with some references to ossuaries no longer within that institution’s hands. The book also amassed the conclusions of Rahmani research into the practice of ossuary burial. It was a triumph, a fitting capstone on a career preoccupied with this burial curiosity.

Historiographically, developments in ossuary research speak to the ages in which they were conceived. But their conclusions are guesses, in the end. Even Rahmani’s theories were critiqued within a few years of his Catalogue’s publication.[44] Scholars cannot tell us definitively why ossuaries were used, in what state they were interred, or from what firmament they originated. 

***

Imagine: In the year 70 CE, you are in a tomb, bare sides of ossuaries sticking slightly outward from their charnel niches, and, in the centre, the pit whose bones form a slight mound. You’re surrounded by family. The darkness deepens as the sun sets, the flickering firelight of a sacked city above you creating the ambient light needed for only the barest of shapes to be visible.

Once the children sleep, there are hushed discussions about what happens next. Do you flee to Jericho? Galilee? Alexandria? How far is far enough from the anger of the rulers of this world, and how close is close enough to stay near to the power of G-d, if they still reign beyond the rubble? You don’t know, so you must do something beyond your usual moral ken – and gamble. So your family decides to gamble on Galilee – at least there you know there will be others like you and distant family you can find community with. You all decide to leave as the light arrives.

So you sleep a little bit, and you wonder, idly, and then with increasing concern, about what becomes of your family’s tomb. Will you ever come back? Who will ever know those in the charnel pit, in the ossuaries? You wake your brother, who has scribal training, and ask this question with concern: Will the dead haunt us if we do not remember them? His brow furrows, and he says he does not know, but that now is no time to tempt spirits.

In the grey morning light, as the brood begins to stir, the two of you begin to scavenge the tomb for an empty ossuary or two and a few nails. You find both, an ossuary prepared for your father and mother upon their eventual death, and one that contains the skull of a cousin who died in war, and that was all that was recovered. You follow your brother to conform and confirm with him who lies where, which occupied ossuaries are whose. Hastily, unsteadily, but with decisiveness, he carves the names you recall into those exposed sides. For a few, you do not remember, and neither does he. For those, you simply record a singular message, “Shalom,” and hope that wishing them well is enough.

The burial niches that are occupied must be cleared, and are done so into the empty ossuaries. This is a hasty job, but is done cleanly. Surly the deceased will understand if their burial is rushed, you say to each other, in times of war. So your cousin rests with your dead sister and what is left of her child, and your nephew rests with a few small children who died of malnourishment during the siege. “Peace,” too, will be their resting phrase.

As everyone rises and begins to prepare to leave, your elders look upon you and your brother with approval. Your eldest relative, though, says that there are other guards against the dead that can be done. She instructs your brother to carve on the smooth face of an ossuary lid alphabetical sequences. These, she says, will confound spirits with their esoteric meaning, and thus encourage them to rest peacefully. Place it by the door, she says. So, for one of the older bone boxes, the heavy limestone lid is lifted and placed against the inner threshold of the door. You and the others must step over it as you squeeze through the narrow entrance left the previous day.

The last you will ever see of this tomb will be in the blue-grey morning light, as its shaft penetrates the tomb, slowly narrowing as the stone is rolled back over the entrance.