While conducting archaeological works at the Abel Beth Maacah site, a group of researchers stumbled upon five shattered storage jars in a building dating back to the Iron Age. Besides finding the remains of grapes and what could have been wine in one of the jars, the scientists found a Hebrew inscription reading "leBenayau" on another jar.
“I admit that we didn’t see the inscription when we washed the finds”, Dr Naama Yahalom-Mack from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem told Haaretz.
However, when restorer Adrianne Ganor started putting the broken pieces together, she noticed faint traces of ink on the jar.
In Hebrew, the preposition "le" means "to", thus "leBenayau" means that the jar belonged to a person named Benayau.
The finding may change the current view on the borders of ancient Israel, showing that they could have been further to the north than previously believed.