First Impression: What We Learn from King Ahaz’s Seal

Home > Magazines > BAR > May/June 1998

It is time to give BAR readers a look at the first seal impression of a Hebrew king ever found. BAR editor Hershel Shanks knew of its existence before I showed it at the Annual Meeting in New Orleans in November 1996, so before the meeting he announced a contest to guess the name of the king.a After the public lecture at the Annual Meeting, he disclosed the name of the king and announced the winner of the contest, a woman from Switzerland.b Now, having published the seal impression in Hebrew,c it is appropriate that its first English publication […]

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Footnotes

“Guess the Inscription, Win Fabulous Prizes,” BAR 22:04.

“We Have a Winner—But No Picture,” BAR 23:02.

Robert Deutsch, Messages from the Past: Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Isaiah Through the Destruction of the First Temple—Shlomo Moussaieff Collection and an Up-To-Date Corpus (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publications, 1997) (in Hebrew).

See the following BAR articles by Hershel Shanks: “In Private Hands,” BAR 22:02 and “The Fingerprint of Jeremiah’s Scribe,” BAR 22:02; “Magnificent Obsession,” BAR 22:03; and “Three Shekels for the Lord,” BAR 23:06.

Endnotes

C.C. Torrey, “A Hebrew Seal from the Reign of Ahaz,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 79 (1940), p. 27; also published in Nahman Avigad, and Benjamin Sass, Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1997), p. 51.

See James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1955), p. 282.