Blue Cord

The Jerusalem Post reported last Wednesday that Eilat Mazar has found a new seal in Jerusalem. She dates the seal to 538–445. Although the Post does not explain her reasons for this date, it is presumably based on the stratum in which the seal was found.

Mazar reads the name on the inscription as Temech and connects it with a family mentioned in Nehemiah 7:55. But as several others have pointed out, she is reading the inscription backwards. Seal engravers normally wrote in mirror image, because they wanted the seal to leave a positive image when pressed into clay. A more likely reading is Shelomith, a name found in Ezra 8:10. Of course, the fact that both names appear in the Bible tell us nothing about the seal except that it contains a known name. There is no reason that the person on the seal has to be someone mentioned in the Bible.

Even if it is someone named in the Bible, Mazar overstates the importance of this find. She says,

The seal of the Temech family gives us a direct connection between archaeology and the biblical sources and serves as actual evidence of a family mentioned in the Bible. . . . One cannot help being astonished by the credibility of the biblical source as seen by the archaeological find.

This seal does nothing to establish the credibility of the Bible. Even if it shows that the Shelomith in Ezra 8:10 (or the Temech in Nehemiah 7:55) were actual people, this is not exactly something that anyone has doubted. But just because the Bible is accurate with regards to post–exilic names does not mean that it is accurate in other respects. One would have thought that by now we would have moved away from trying to “prove” the Bible through archaeology. After all, the biblical archaoelogy movement ended a couple of decades ago.

For fuller discussions of the seal, please see Chris Heard’s post at Higgaion and Jim West’s discussion on his eponymous blog.

In writing my previous post about the Jezebel seal, I came across the following quote in Ha’aretz:

In her paper, scheduled to appear in the highly-respected Biblical Archaeology Review, Korpel lists observations pertaining to the seal’s symbolism, unusual size, shape and time period.

What struck me as odd about this sentence is the reference to the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review as “highly-respected.”

For those of my readers who don’t know, BAR is a monthly magazine published by the Biblical Archaeology Society that covers current topics in the field of archaeology related to the Bible.   It is a very enjoyable magazine and popular among non-experts.  It prints high-quality glossy photos of archaeological finds and site, and features articles by some of the top scholars in the field.

The presence of these top scholars as authors means that there are often high-quality articles.  But this is not always the case. It is not a peer-reviewed journal.  As a result,  BAR has a tendency to publishing highly-speculative and sensationalistic articles.  It also likes to personalize differences in opinions and portray scholarly debates as fierce feuds.  Such tactics help to sell magazines, but they are out of place in scholarly discourse.

To call BAR “highly-respected” is something of an overstatement.  In general, it is looked upon with mixed-feelings by scholars.  It has some good articles and great photos, but the negatives temper our love it.  We read it, but mostly as as guilty pleasure.

To put it another way:

Biblical Archaoelogical Review is to the Journal of Biblical Literature as People is to U.S. News & World Report.

Although I am coming in rather late on this topic, I thought I would post a quick note on the recent discussion about the so-called “Jezebel Seal.”

In a forthcoming article in BAR, Marjo Korpel argues that a seal in the Israel Museum (IDAM 65-321) belongs to the infamous Jezebel, wife of King Ahab of Israel. Nahman Avigad had first published this seal in 1964, but noted that there is no solid basis for ascribing it to Jezebel. The story of Korpel’s identification was first reported in Ha’aretz. Several blogs have discussed this seal over the past week, and Chris Heard at Higgaion has a good summary of the debate and links to other biblioblogs that have touched on the subject.

Jim West has a guest blog about the seal by Chris Rollston of Johnson Bible College Emmanuel School of Religion. Chris and I were students together at Johns Hopkins, so I can attest that he is well-versed in epigraphy. His thoughts on an inscription such as this are always worth noting.

One of the more damaging critiques that Chris notes is that the writing on the seal is later than the 9th century (the date of the biblical Jezebel). If this is the case, then there is no possibility that the seal belonged to her. Avigad dated the seal to the 9th-8th century, but our knowledge of scripts has increased greatly since that time. Zbl is a common root in Northwest Semitic, so it would not be surprising to find other people with that element in their name.

All in all, there seems little reason to ascribe this seal to the Jezebel of biblical fame.

Follow up: Amihai Mazar has posted a short paragraph about the seal on the American Schools of Oriental Research website.

The AP is reporting in an article carried by Yahoo! that archaeologists in Jerusalem have uncovered 100 meters of a tunnel that was built during the Second Temple period.  Although originally designed as a drainage channel, the tunnel was used by many Jews to escape from Jerusalem during the Roman seige in 70 CE.  The archaeologists seem to draw this conclusion by connecting the tunnel with one mentioned by Josephus in The Wars of the Jews.  The tunnel seems to run from the Temple Mount to the Kidron Valley.

Hat tip: Charles Halton at Awilum.

Chris Heard at Higgaion is currently reviewing Political Archaeology and Holy Nationalism by Terje Oestigaard.  So far he has covered chapter 1 and chapter 2a.  Oestigaard criticizes archaeology in Israel for being used far too often for political purposes and for not being engaged with archaeology in other countries.  According to Chris, Oestigaard sees Israeli archaeology as falling outside the mainstream and not engaging with the rest of the field in theoretical discourse.

You would probably find few who would argue with his first point, although I would argue that archaeology in Israel is motivated by theological reasons as often as it is political.  Neither make for particularly good science.  But like Chris, I am more interested in his claim that Palestinian archaeology is detached from the rest of the field.

While this was true by and large during the era of biblical archaeology,¹Â  today it is not the case, at least among the archaeologists I know.  Archaeologists who work in Israel are very familiar with the scholarly literature on archaeology in the ancient Near East and are very engaged with scholars who work in Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Arabia, Greece, and Mesopotamia.  When I did seminar work in Levantine archaeology, we were very focused on the theoretical literature, even though the majority of the class were philologists.

One of the areas where this is clearest is in the recent focus on ethnicity.  Archaeologists in Israel are certainly engaged in this debate within the larger field, as can be seen by some excellent works that have come out in the past few years.  This larger debate has certainly been affecting our understanding of certain key issues within the history of the Levant, such as the transition from the Late Bronze to the Iron Age.

It is true that archaeologists who work in Israel are less engaged — but not totally disengaged — with archaeology in other parts of the world outside of the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean world.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  For one thing, most other areas in the world did not have developed civilizations at this time, which means there is little comparative material from the same time period.  We can have a discussion that involves a Levantine archaeologist and a specialist in 13th century German archaeology, and such discussions will yield some benefit.  But the methods and constructs used are going to be different, if for no other reason than the fact that we are talking about wet vs. dry archaeology.²

1. For the non-specialists, I should define the term biblical archaeology, since most people assume it means nothing more than archaeology in Israel.  Biblical archaeology was a movement in the mid-20th century that used the Bible the primary mean for interpreting archaeological finds.  Archaeology, in turn, was seen as demonstrating the historicity of the Bible.  The movement is closely associated with W.F. Albright and his student G. Ernest Wright.  Few in the field of archaeology today would use this approach, but the term biblical archaeology is still used by non-specialists to refer to archaeology in Israel. [back]
2. I.e., archaeology done in an area with high rainfall vs. that done in arid climates.  Moisture in the soil has a huge effect on how you excavate and the condition of the finds. [back]