The two family archives from the Elephantine Jewish Community contain respectively four (C 5, 6, 8, 9) and six documents (K 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 12) dealing with a single house each. One of the questions which arises is the occurrence, once in each of the archives (C 8:2; K 12:5), of the designation mhḥsn, translated either as “holding property” or as “military colonist”. Is the term of general meaning and its occurrence in each of the passages coincidence or is it a technical term with legal significance?