Review: Why Objects from the Antiquities Market Matter

Home > Magazines > BAR > March/April 2004

We don’t know where many of the objects in this book were found, but they have much to teach us.

By Hershel Shanks

Biblical Period Hebrew Bullae: The Josef Chaim Kaufman Collection

Robert Deutsch

(Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publication, 2003) 452 pp., 421 figures, $150 (plus $18 shipping; order via e-mail: mail@archaeological-center.com)

When I was a practicing lawyer, I was always eager to know the best argument the other side could make. In order to test my own position, I had to know what the opposition could muster. With that in mind, I would like to hear from anyone who thinks that Robert Deutsch should be condemned for publishing a series of books—some by himself,1 some with other scholars2—of Biblical-period inscriptions from private antiquities collections. That is, the inscriptions—seals, bullae, plaques, ostraca, vessels, etc.—are unprovenanced. We don’t know where they were found. Many of them were probably looted. Yet they have […]

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Footnotes

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.

See Tsvi Schneider, “Six Biblical Signatures,” BAR, July/August 1991.

Many scholars, however, have contested these findings. See, for example, André Lemaire, “Ossuary Update—Israel Antiquities Authority’s Report Deeply Flawed,” BAR, November/December 2003.

Hershel Shanks, ed., Ancient Israel—From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, rev. and expanded edition, 1999).

Endnotes

Robert Deutsch, Messages from the Past; Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Isaiah Through the Destruction of the First Temple (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publications, 1999), and Robert Deutsch, “A Hoard of Fifty Hebrew Clay Bullae from the Time of Hezekiah,” in Robert Deutsch, ed., Shlomo: Studies in Epigraphy, Iconography History and Archaeology in Honor of Shlomo Moussaieff (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publications, 2003).

Robert Deutsch and Michael Heltzer, Forty New Ancient West Semitic Inscriptions (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publications, 1994); Robert Deutsch and Michael Heltzer, New Epigraphic Evidence from the Biblical Period (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publications, 1995); Robert Deutsch and Michael Heltzer, Windows to the Past (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publications, 1997); Robert Deutsch and André Lemaire, Biblical Period Personal Seals in the Shlomo Moussaieff Collection (Tel Aviv: Archaeological Center Publications, 2000).

The falcon, however, is an Egyptian symbol. Sometimes a falcon on these seals wears an Egyptian crown.