King Hezekiah’s Seal Bears Phoenician Imagery
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Footnotes
Robert Deutsch, “First Impression—What We Learn from King Ahaz’s Seal,” BAR 24:03.
Nahman Avigad, Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Jeremiah(Jerusalem:Israel Exploration Society, 1986). See Hershel Shanks, “Jeremiah’s Scribe and Confidant Speaks from a Hoard of Clay Bullae,” BAR 13:05.
Endnotes
See Ruth Hestrin and Michal Dayagi, “A Seal Impression of a Servant of King Hezekiah,” Israel Exploration Journal 24 (1974), pp. 27–29; see also Nahman Avigad and Benjamin Sass, Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Israel Exploration Society, Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology, 1997), no. 407. A duplicate of this bulla (that is, a bulla stamped by the same seal) has been published recently by Robert Deutsch, in Messages from the Past: Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Isaiah Through the Destruction of the First Temple (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publication, 1997), p. 31, no. 2; two other bullae of a servant of Hezekiah are published in the same volume, pp. 52–53, nos. 3 and 4. In the annals of Sennacherib, the transcription of the Judahite king’s name is written
See Avigad, Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Jeremiah (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1986), p. 110, no. 199.
See the discussion in Deutsch, Messages from the Past, p. 163, no. 199. I am indebted to him for photographs of the two bullae and for two drawings made with access to the original bullae. In his drawing of the new Hezekiah bulla, he has seen some detail I do not have on my own drawing, which was made from poor photographs. Hence I have substituted his drawing for mine. His reconstruction of the Avigad bulla is bold but I believe accurate.
Downward ticks on the lower horizontal strokes of the zayin are probably present, though the traces are faint (Deutsch has not shown them on his drawing). The curved, lowest horizontal of the he of
See David Ussishkin, “The Destruction of Lachish by Sennacherib and the Dating of the Royal Judean Storage Jars,” Tel Aviv 4 (1977), pp. 28–60.
See Jo Ann Hackett et al., “Defusing Pseudo-Scholarship: The Siloam Inscription Ain’t Hasmonean,” BAR 23:02.
For a discussion of the scarab (dung beetle) iconography popular in Israel, see Sass, in Studies in the Iconography of Northwest Semitic Inscribed Seals, ed. Sass and C. Uehlinger (Fribourg: University Press, 1992), pp. 214–219. On the significance of the scarab in Egypt, see H. Bonnet, “Skarabaeus,” in Reallexikon der ägyptischen Religionsgeschichte (Berlin: DeGruyter, 1952), pp. 720–722 and references.
My colleague Lawrence Stager called this passage and its application to the winged sun disk to my attention.