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.
