Fit for a Queen: Jezebel’s Royal Seal - The BAS Library
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Fit for a Queen: Jezebel’s Royal Seal

By Marjo C.A. Korpel

Thousands and thousands of seals and seal impressions (bullae) from the ancient Near East have been found, including Hebrew exemplars in Israel. Documents would be tied up with string and a blob of clay placed over the string; a seal would then be impressed into the clay to identify the sender and assure the security of the document. Or a seal would be impressed into the handle of a jar to identify the owner— for example, the so-called l’melekh handles (“[belonging] to the king”), of which there are several thousand. Or a seal could be used to prevent unauthorized […]

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Footnotes

1.

In an interview with BAR, July/August 2005. Also experts like André Lemaire and Frank Moore Cross have criticized the over-cautious Puritanism of the moment. See “Update— Finds or Fakes,” BAR, September/October 2005, especially Cross, “Statement on Inscribed Artifacts without Provenience.”

2.

The letters on the seal are in the paleo-Hebrew script used before the Babylonian exile.

3.

See Frank Moore Cross, “King Hezekiah’s Seal Bears Phoenician Imagery,” BAR, March/April 1999, and Meir Lubetski, “King Hezekiah’s Seal Revisited,” BAR, July/August 2001.

Endnotes

1.

Vol. 14, p.274.

2.

In fact, this is interesting with regard to the authenticity of the seal: It would be unbelievable that a forger made an authentic looking seal but spelled Queen Jezebel’s name wrongly, or spelled it correctly but deliberately destroyed the upper part of the seal.

3.

Lawrence Mykytiuk suggested an aleph was chipped off, but he doubted any identification with Queen Jezebel. Lawrence J. Mykytiuk, Identifying Biblical Persons in Northwest Semitic Inscriptions of 1200–539 B.C.E. (Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2004), p.216.

4.

André Lemaire, “Divinitées égyptiennes dans l’onomastique phénicienne,” in C. Bonnet et al., eds., Studia Phoenicia, vol. 4: Religio Phoenicia, Namur: Société des Études Classiques, 97.