How Many?

018

How many seals appear in the first four volumes of Othmar Keel’s corpus of seals from Israel and Palestine, covering only archaeological sites beginning with letters A–H?

072

Answer: 5,597

Seals were used frequently in the lands of the Bible and served a variety of purposes, the primary one being a form of identification, much like the modern signature. When sending a letter, the author would seal the document by pressing his stamp seal into a lump of clay, applied to the document or to a string wrapped around the document. This was done to avoid tampering with the document and to identify the sender. Sometimes seals were also worn as amulets or jewelry. The vast number of seals found throughout ancient Israel gives us important clues about the Biblical world, including personal and site names as well as iconography. Imported seals, such as scarabs from Egypt, testify to foreign influence, trade, interaction or presence at sites in the southern Levant, which is important for understanding and reconstructing history.

Leading a team at the University of Fribourg, Othmar Keel is compiling all of the seals discovered in Israel and Palestine into a single corpus, making the information—previously buried in site reports—much more accessible.¹ The seals featured in his work span several thousands of years, from the Early Bronze Age in the third millennium B.C. to the end of the Persian period in the late fourth century B.C. Keel wrote an introduction to this corpus in 1995, and the first volume of the corpus appeared in 1997.^a The fourth, most recent volume was published in 2012. Since currently Keel is less than a third of the way through the alphabet, it is difficult to estimate when the entire corpus will be published, but with archaeological sites from 18 more letters of the alphabet to go, we eagerly anticipate the next volume!