Royal Signature: Name of Israel’s Last King Surfaces in a Private Collection

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The name of the northern kingdom of Israel’s last king has turned up on a beautiful seal from the eighth century B.C.E.! Although the seal did not belong to the king himself, it was the property of one of his high-ranking ministers. The king is Hoshea (HWSû‘ in Hebrew; the same name as that of the prophet Hosea, but referring to a different person).a Hoshea ruled Israel from 732 or 731 B.C.E. to 722 B.C.E., just before it was destroyed by Assyrian conquest. The minister’s name inscribed on the seal is Abdi (‘BDY), or, to use his full name […]

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Footnotes

By English-language convention, the prophet is called Hosea and the king Hoshea; there is no difference in the Hebrew.

Normal practice is to describe seal designs as they are read when impressed on a bulla, that is, in mirror image.

See Tsvi Schneider, “Six Biblical Signatures—Seals and Seal Impressions of Six Biblical Personages Recovered,” BAR 17:04.

See the following articles in BAR: Simon B. Parker, “Siloam Inscription Memorializes Engineering Achievement,” BAR 20:04; and Hershel Shanks, “Please Return the Siloam Inscription to Jerusalem,” BAR 17:03.

See Victor Hurowitz, “Did King Solomon Violate the Second Commandment?” Bible Review, October 1994.

A common design in the ancient Near East, the winged sun disk was originally a royal symbol; later, it had only apotropaic (for averting evil) or decorative significance. The representation of the sun disk was slightly different in each country; the horizontal one on this seal is characteristic of the Israelites (see D. Parayre, in Benjamin Sass and C. Uehlinger, eds., Studies in the Iconography of Northwest Semitic Inscribed Seals, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis [Fribourg, 1993], pp. 34–35, 45).

Endnotes

Sale 6517, December 14, 1993.

See G.I. Davies, Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions: Corpus and Concordance (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), p. 454; and Gabriel Barkay, “A Group of Stamped Handles from Judah,” Eretz-Israel 23 (Avraham Biran volume, 1992), pp. 113–128.

See Ruth Hestrin and Michal Dayagi-Mendels, Inscribed Seals (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1979), p. 18, no. 3.

Gösta W. Ahlström has proposed the tenth-century B.C.E. king Jeroboam I of Israel (“The Seal of Shema,” Scandinavian Journal on the Old Testament 7 [1993], pp. 208–215), but this early dating does not fit the paleography or iconography.

See Pierre Bordreuil, Catalogue des sceaux ouest-sémitiques inscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale, du Musée du Louvre et du Musée biblique de Bible et Terre Sainte, (Paris, 1986), no. 40–41.

C.C. Torrey, “A Hebrew Seal from the Reign of Ahaz,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 79 (1940), pp. 27–28, fig. 1; and Davies, Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions, p. 137.

Hestrin and Dayagi-Mendels, Inscribed Seals, p. 19, no. 4.

James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1955), p. 284.

See Robert Deutsch and Michael Heltzer, Forty New Ancient West Semitic Inscriptions (Tel Aviv-Jaffa: Archaeological Center, 1994), nos. 12–13, 21.

10.

See André Lemaire, “Sept nouveaux sceaux nord-ouest sémitiques inscrits,” Semitica 41–42 (1993), pp. 63–80.

11.

See Benjamin Sass, “The Pre-Exilic Hebrew Seals: Iconism and Aniconism,” in Sass and C. Uehlinger, eds., Studies in the Iconography of Northwest Semitic Inscribed Seals, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 125 (Fribourg, 1993), pp. 194–256, esp. 229–232.

12.

L.A. Wolfe and F. Sternberg, Objects with Semitic Inscriptions 1100 B.C.–A.D. 700, Auction XXIII (20 November 1989), Zurich, p. 9, no. 2.