“As The Seal Upon Thy Heart”

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Over 50 years ago, Robert Hatch Kennett described Ancient Hebrew Social Life and Custom as Indicated in Law, Narrative, and Metaphor¹ in one of the celebrated Schweich Lectures, a series dedicated to illuminating biblical issues in concise but authoritative fonm. More recently, Roland de Vaux covered the same ground in much more massive fashion in his Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions.² But neither of these surveys had very much to say about seals. Perhaps these tiny objects, the work of the glyptic^a artist, were thought too insignificant to merit systematic attention, or not sufficiently unique to Israel. For seals are a typical hallmark of ancient Near Eastern civilization in general, and they are particularly characteristic of Mesopotamian culture. Their role can best be studied in the light of the comparative textual data from the ancient Near East, and of the material remains recovered by archaeology. With the help of these resources, the study of seals will be rewarded with new insights into biblical law, narrative and metaphor.

The oldest known examples of seals—from the sixth millennium B.C.—are in the from of a “stamp,” that is, a hand-held stone with a flat surface that was incised with a design or drawing.³ This was then pressed into the wet cray of a pottery vessel to leave a seal impression. Before the end of the fourth millennium B.C., however, Mesopotamia developed the characteristic cylinder seal, which was better suited for making impressions. A cylindrical seal could be rolled around the neck of a pottery jar to create a continuous frieze in the wet clay that sealed the jar. Or it could be rolled over a clay tablet.⁴ By this time, clay tablets were the preferred medium for the revolutionary new invention known as writing.

Soon enough, the two inventions—seals and writing—were combined by adding an inscription to the drawing or design on the seal. The inscription might augment the identification of the seal owner or express his devotion to one or more deities. The inscription was carefully carved in mirror-writing (“negative” writings) so that its impression on clay would appear in positive form.

The cylinder seal became the preferred form of seal in Mesopotamia and wherever Mesopotamian 022influence spread in the Near East for over two millennia. Only in the first millennium was it gradually replaced by a new type of stamp-seal, typically set in a ring and usually referred to as a signet.

In its long history and widespread use in the biblical world, the seal served many functions—legal, artistic and cultic. These different roles, together with the physical attributes of the seal, need to be understood before we can appreciate some of the allusions to seals—both literal and metaphoric—in the Bible.

Seals as legal instruments

The most basic, indeed perhaps the original, signficance of the seal was legal: It emerged, together with the beginnings of writing and of capital formation, as a mark of ownership or of contractual obligation by an individual. In effect, the seal was a symbolic representation of the individual and served to commit him as well as to identify him. Small in size and easily carried on the person, it was readily available to be impressed (in the case of a stamp seal) or rolled (in the case of a cylinder seal) on the wet clay of a vessel or tablet. Mesopotamian legal literature amply documents this aspect of the seal, most intriguingly in negative cases—when seals were lost. When that unfortunate event occurred, the contract provided that if a tablet turned up in the future with an impression of the lost seal on it, the tablet was to 023be considered null and void; in modern parlance, it was to be shredded. If the hapless seal owner was sufficiently prominent, his loss was the subject of a public pronouncement by the official herald through out the city streets.

Mesopotamian religious literature also deals with the loss of a seal. The divination textbooks generally interpreted such a loss, like most other contingencies, as an unfavorable portent. The dream omens in particular tended to equate the loss of a seal with the death of a son or daughter. There were, however, suitable rituals to ward off the evil portended. Whether in a legal or a “psycho-social” sense, the ancient view tended to identify a person with his seal.⁵

In the Bible, this same view is illustrated in the story of Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar (Genesis 38). Tamar had been married to Judah’s eldest son, who had died, leaving her a childless widow. Judah gave Tamar his second son, but he too died without children. Reluctant to give his last son to Tamar, Judah procrastinated. In order to perpetuate Judah’s line, Tamar, in the guise of a harlot, tricked Judah into sleeping with her and extracted from him, 024in pledge of future payment, his seal, his cord, and the staff in his hand. A little later in the narrative, these items serve to identify him. In leaving his seal, Judah in effect left a part of himself that established both his identity and his legal obligation to redeem the pledge he had made.

Judah’s seal, carved with its own design, was clearly distinctive and identifiable. But why the cord and staff? To answer this question, we must return to the Mesopotamian evidence, in particular the manner in which the seals were mounted and worn. The typical Mesopotamian cylinder seal was invariably drilled through its long axis with a continuous hole designed to accommodate a pin that served two practical purposes. With the help of the pin, the seal could, first, be rolled in clay (much in the manner of a rolling pin used on dough). Second, the pin, with the seal on it, could fasten robes together at the shoulder. Or the seal pin could be provided with an eye of its own and there by could be attached to a bracelet and worn around the wrist. Indeed, according to one theory, the very word for wrist in Sumerian means literally “seal carrier,” i.e., “(the place) where the seal is hung.” Such is also the evidence of the oldest preserved illustration on the subject from Mesopotamia, in which a seal hangs from the wrist by its pin mount. And this appears to provide the explanation for the particular, not to say peculiar, combination of personal effects that Tamar demanded of Judah as his pledge. His seal, cord and staff are, in fact, a cylinder seal, bracelet and pinmount respectively.⁶

Seals as Gifts

Beyond their legal role, seals (and their mountings) soon acquired inherent value as objects of art and thus served a second function—as gifts. Mesopotamian literature amply attests this role. In a Sumerian lament, for example, the goddess Geshtin-anna offers to ransom her brother Dumuzi with her most precious ornaments, beginning with her silver pin and lapis lazuli seal.⁷ King Shu-Sin of Ur (c. 2036–2028 B.C.) bestows upon his priestess-concubine a pin of gold and a seal of lapis lazuli, among other presents.⁸ Archival texts from Ur dated to Shu-Sin’s son and successor register various amounts of gold to decorate seals of lapis, including two on a pin.⁹ The pin was most often given to women; it is quite conceivable that it formed a characteristic portion of the marriage gift.¹⁰

Because of their inherent value seals were worthy of donation even to the deity. Thus they assumed a third role, as votive objects. Votive seals are well attested for all periods and over all areas of the ancient Near East. An example from the Middle Euphrates even found its way to Beersheba in Israel.¹¹ But votive sea are partcularly distinctive in ancient Sumer, where they are set apart from their more “practical” counterparts not only by their considerably greater size, costlier material and more elaborate decoration, but also by a special genre of votive inscriptions found only on original seals, never on seal impressions. Votive seals are in fact frequently inscribed in the positive, not the negative sense; that is, they were intended to be read from the seals themselves, not from their impressions in clay. The inscriptions on these votive seals, like those on larger votive objects, prayed for the lives of the donors and/or their designated beneficiaries. Such seals were no doubt deposited, like other votives, in the sanctuary in order to convey that prayer to the deity in place of the donor or the donor’s statue. Specifically, they 025were meant to be worn by the cult statue of the deity and are well represented in the preserved inventories of the deity’s divine garments and accoutrements.

In the Bible, a corresponding role is played by the seals in the furbishing of the Tabernacle in the wilderness. There, rings were brought by “men and women, all whose hearts moved them, all who would make a wave offering of gold to the Lord” (Exodus 35:22).¹² The Hebrew word for these rings (tabba‘at) refers more specifically to signet rings. In this biblical text, the rings are mentioned together with bracelets, earrings and pendants, much as they are in the list of expiatory offerings of a portion of the booty offered to the Lord later in Israel’s desert wanderings (Numbers 31:50).

Seals Status Symbols

If the ordinary mortal could offer a seal to the deity, it was equally true in the biblical world that, as a mark of special favor, he might also receive a seal from his superior. In this role, the seal served as a symbol for conveying authority. In Mesopotamia and Elam, the king himself bestowed the seal on his chosen retainers. Such royally granted seals had a distinctive design and inscription known from the end of the third and the beginning of the second millennia. They have been described as “presentation seals” or “office seals.”¹³

In the Bible, the investiture of Joseph involved Pharaoh’s taking the signet ring from his own hand and placing it on Joseph’s to symbolize the conferral of royal authority (Genesis 41:42). The Book of Esther repeats this process, first in the case of the wicked Haman (Esther 3:10) and then in his replacement by Esther’s guardian Mordecai (Esther 8:2). Each time the action signifies the delegation of royal authority to the vizier.

In Israel itself, where God so often plays the role reserved for kings elsewhere in the Near East, the (divine) seal becomes a metaphor for the granting or withholding of divine favor. In Jeremiah’s words, God says of the hapless penultimate king of Judah (22:24): “If you, O Coniah, son of Jehoiakim, King of Judah, were a signet on my right hand, I would tear you off even from there.” In rather more positive terms, the post-exilic prophet Haggai concludes his message (2:23): “I will take you, O my servant Zerubabbel son of Shealtiel—declares the Lord—and make you as a signet; for I have chosen you—declares the Lord of Hosts.” Both prophets imply the intimacy of the signet ring with its finger and both presumably have in mind a stamp-seal set in such a ring.

So far, we have encountered seals worn on wrist and finger. But a far more common attachment of the pin-mounted (cylinder) seal was, by means of a necklace, around the neck. This is true of votive seals as well as of functional seals. A ninth-century B.C. king of Babylon is recorded as having presented a seal to the god Marduk; it is described as “a cylinder seal of lustrous lapis lazuli, which is firmly set in reddish gold, worthy of his holy neck.”¹⁴ Cuneiform literature provides many other references to votive seals worn around the neck of cult statues of deities, as well as of kings.

Ordinary cylinder seals worn around the necks of ordinary mortals are equally well documented. Of the many allusions to seals around the neck, I will cite only one that again seems to use the seal as a metaphor for physical intimacy: In a letter to an Assyrian king (?), we read, “You placed him like a seal around your neck.”¹⁵

This brings us to one of the most celebrated of all biblical similes:

Let me be a seal upon your heart, Like the seal upon your hand [literally, arm]. For love is fierce as death, Passion is mighty as Sheol [the netherworld].

Based on comparable wording in Haggai 2:23 (quoted above), we might also render this passage:

Make me as the seal upon thy heart, As the seal upon thine arm, For love is strong as death, Passion hard as hell.

Franz Rosenzweig¹⁶ and Marvin Pope,¹⁷ to name only two commentators, consider this half verse the very key to the message of the entire book. But what 026does the simile mean? Must we eliminate “the seal upon thine arm” as a meaningless doublet, as a mere repetition of “the seal upon thy heart”? Should we understand the “seal upon thine arm” as a signet ring on the hand? Some commentators would favor one or the other of these interpretations.

But the comparative literary materials from Mesopotamia, as well as the archaeological data regarding ancient seals, allow us to salvage the text as it stands, without these strained interpretations. Just as the Assyrian letter uses the seal around the neck as a metaphor for intimacy, so too in the Song of Songs, the beloved wishes to be as intimate with her lover as the two seals worn by him. One of these was the seal around his neck which rests on his heart. The other one was carried on his wrist, not on his hand. The former can be pictured as a cylinder seal worn in the Mesopotamian manner—mounted on a pin by which it was hung from a necklace. The latter could be a cylinder seal, as reconstructed above from the story of Judah—mounted on a pin hanging from a bracelet. Or the seal on the arm could be a stamp-seal hung from a bracelet of a type known from excavations in Israel.

In any event, only one seal was likely to be worn in each place by any one person; hence both times the definite article “the” is called for before the word “seal” and is in fact used in the Hebrew. (Why most English versions translate “as a seal” here—and in Haggai 2:23—is not clear to me.)

We can thus understand the first half of the biblical simile—the seals on heart and wrist—in the light of the comparative and archaeological evidence. But what is the connection with the second half of the verse? How does the image of the seal bridge the gap between love and death?

Here we may appeal to a further and largely neglected function of Mesopotamian glyptic, namely as funerary offering. Together with tools, weapons, ceramics and jewelry, seals form pan of the private possessions buried with their owners or contributed to their graves during many periods and in many regions of the ancient Near East, including Israel. Seals, moreover, significantly reflect the status of their owners. In the famous Royal Cemetery of Ur, for instance, seals of lapis lazuli decorated with banquet scenes seem to identify higher-ranking temple or court functionaries; seals of shell decorated with contest scenes identify lesser functionaries.¹⁸ It may well be, then, that in the Song of Songs, the beloved seeks not only the physical intimacy of the seal on heart and wrist, but also the status symbol function assumed or retained by the seal in burials: Even as this function of a seal perpetuates the owner’s standing in death, so the beloved declares that her lover’s role will outlive him, his status as her lover will persevere even in the grave. It is in this sense that “love is strong as death.”

Seals as Weapons

In Mesopotamian lore, seals were not only an accompaniment to death but even, at times, its cause. We therefore turn to yet another role played by these tiny objects, namely that of seals as weapons. And here we meet a fourth manner of wearing seals attested, albeit only once, in Sumerian literature, namely, suspended from a dagger.¹⁹ By metaphoric association, the power of the dagger may have been transferred to the seal, in popular belief, even when worn around the neck. Thus, in the fragmentary Akkadian myth of “The Slaying of Labbu,” a deity is instructed to hold “the seal at your throat before your face,” and thus he defeats this mythological beast.²⁰ In the myth of the seven sages, one of these antediluvian sage so angered the god Ea that he “killed (him) with the seal around his neck.”²¹

A less metaphoric and more literal explanation of seals in this apparently incongruous role as weapons emerges from the Babylonian omen literature. Three times, the so-called historical omens tell us, a reigning monarch of the great Sargonic dynasty was assassinated by the seals of his courtiers. Modern interpretations of this persistent tradition have diverged widely. One theory has it that it was the magical potency of the seals that lent them their power to kill. Others replace the translation “seal” with “stylus” or “heavy stone tablet.” Still others suggest some other cylindrically shaped object or even a sealed (and perhaps forged) document. Another approach simply rejects the whole genre of “historical” omens as devoid of historical fact. However, not only has recent research vindicated some of these historical omens, but the clothing-pins on which some early seals were mounted could easily have done the deed. From here it is only a short step to the later pin-mounts. While these pin-mounts were often of gold or silver, especially where a divine or royal owner was involved, a servant of the king would make do with a wooden one, and this could be sharpened to a deadly point! Thus the courtiers could come into the royal presence, ostensibly unarmed, but at a signal whip the cords from their necks or wrists and plunge the sharpened seal-mounts into their unsuspecting victim.²²

While the Bible has no exact parallel to this use of the seal, it has its own instance of the concealed weapon. In the story of Ehud, this left-handed judge rid Israel of its Moabite oppressor with a well-timed thrust from the dagger hidden on his right side under his cloak (Judges 3:15-end).

Even this lengthy catalogue does not exhaust the roles played by the unprepossessing seal in ancient social life and custom as indicated in law, narrative and metaphor. In Mesopotamia, the seal also served as an amulet,²³ in the Hebrew Bible as a symbol for perfection (Ezekiel 28:12), in the New Testament as 027a metaphor for baptism,²⁴ and in the Talmud as the warrant for divine truth.²⁵ But enough seen offered to suggest that a close reading of the ancient texts, their comparison with each other and their confrontation with archaeological findings can illuminate the hidden corners of biblical life.

This is a revised version of “‘As the Seal Upon Thine Arm’: Glyptic Metaphors in the Biblical World,” in Leonard Gorelick and Elizabeth Williams-Fone, eds., Ancient Seals and the Bible (Undena Publications: Malibu, California, 1983), referred to in the notes as Hallo, 1983, pp. 7–17 and pl. xii. This article may be consulted for philological details and for bibliographical documentation not included here.

Over 50 years ago, Robert Hatch Kennett described Ancient Hebrew Social Life and Custom as Indicated in Law, Narrative, and Metaphor1 in one of the celebrated Schweich Lectures, a series dedicated to illuminating biblical issues in concise but authoritative fonm. More recently, Roland de Vaux covered the same ground in much more massive fashion in his Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions.2 But neither of these surveys had very much to say about seals. Perhaps these tiny objects, the work of the glyptica artist, were thought too insignificant to merit systematic attention, or not sufficiently unique to Israel. For […]