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orion Orion yahad ostracon

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Here is the other post that bounced:

 > Cryer in Dec. questioned the reading of yahad, questioning the middle
 > letter, though not the yod or dalet. On 7 Dec Cryer wrote, inter alia,
"not
 > to say that the [yahad] reading is out of the question, but only that
there
 > is no particular reason to advocate it." Perhaps his views have changed.
On
 > 12 Dec. Cryer expressed some doubts about N-shaped hets in general.
 > Presumably, this is less an issue now, since (I read) that E. Eshel
showed
 > further examples. And, after all, _The Book of Hebrew Script_ [in Hebrew]
 > by Ada Yardeni (Jerusalem: Carta, 1991) includes examples. The scripts of
 > the time are relevant, and our scribe showed a range of letter-shapes.
 
 Once again, I have to point out that examples from other locations
 cannot tell us much about this ostracon.  The fact is, there are
 several hets in the ostracon and none of them has an N shape.
 Someone on here (forgive me) pointed to the N-shaped he in line 7,
 but a look at the photo shows that C&E's drawing greatly exaggerates
 the N shape.  The drawing has the middle stroke sloping down almost
 to the bottom of the right leg, when the photo shows that it doesn't
 go nearly that far and barely reaches the mid-point of the right leg.
 The middle stroke of the letter in line 8 dips much more sharply
 downward, and actually looks more like the aleph at the beginning of
 line 4 than any het or he elsewhere in the ostracon itself.  The yod
 cannot possibly be a yod; both sides are much too big, and as Jim
 West already pointed out (I think it was Jim - I'm working from
 memory here), there is a center stroke from the bottom of the left
 leg across to intersect the right leg about 2/3 of the way down from
 the top.  I am frankly baffled how anyone can see a yod there.
 
 As Greg Doudna pointed out already, there is no Yahad reading in this
 ostracon.  It really is that simple.
 Dave Washburn
 dwashbur@nyx.net
 http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur/home.html