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Josef Nave

Joseph Naveh was an Israeli archaeologist and scholar of ancient Semitic scripts and inscriptions who taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

1928 to 2011Study of West Semitic scriptsDeciphering the Mesad Hashavyahu ostraconIdentifying Tel Miqne with Ekron

Born: 21 January 1928, Mukachevo
Died: 21 November 2011, Jerusalem
Occupation: pedagogue, archaeologist, palaeographer, university teacher
Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Josef Nave was born in 1928 in Mukachevo

Naveh was born in 1928 to a Jewish family in Mukachevo, then part of Czechoslovakia. He attended a Hebrew school there. He immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1945.

In 1948 he joined the Israel Defense Forces. He studied Jewish history, Bible and archaeology at the Hebrew University. He received his doctorate in 1967 for a study of the development of the Aramaic script.

From 1955 he worked as an archaeologist at the Israel Department of Antiquities, and from 1958 to 1971 he was the Jerusalem district archaeologist. He surveyed sites including En Gedi and Tel Miqne, which he proposed to identify with Philistine Ekron. In 1960 he excavated Mesad Hashavyahu, where a Hebrew ostracon known as the reaper's letter was found, and he deciphered it.

He then turned to the study of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic scripts. He worked on inscriptions from Masada, Tel Dan and Ekron, and exposed several modern forgeries. From 1971 he taught at the Hebrew University's Institute of Archaeology, becoming a full professor in 1980.

He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1994 and received the Percia Schimmel Prize in 1997. He retired in 1997 and continued to publish. He died in Jerusalem in 2011.