“Belonging to the king” (lmlk) is inscribed on this stamp from a late-eighth-century B.C.E. ceramic storage jar handle. The lmlk stamps are part of a large corpus of evidence indicating the existence of an expanding state in Judah during the reign of Hezekiah. This nation-building activity also included the centralization of Israelite religion; Hezekiah sought to centralize the worship of the Israelite God Yahweh in Jerusalem by tearing down outlying shrines and destroying images of Yahweh and other deities.