Endnote 22 – King Hezekiah’s Seal Revisited

A successful struggle for the reunification of Upper and Lower Egypt under one monarch takes place toward the end of the seventh century B.C.E. See the relevant Egyptian sources in James H. Breasted, ed., Ancient Records of Egypt IV (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1906), pp. 452, 454. Neferkara Shabako, the Nubian pharaoh of the XXVth dynasty who unified Upper and Lower Egypt, commemorated his achievements on a scarab; see J. Yoyottee, “Plaidoyer pour l’authenticité de scarabée historique de Shabako,” Biblica 37.4 (1956), pp. 457–476. Possibly Hezekiah emulated Shabako by symbolizing his attempted unification of Israel and Judah with a scarab seal.