Uehlinger, Winderbaum and Zelinger (2023), A Seventh-Century BCE Cylinder Seal from Jerusalem Depicting Worship of the Moon God's Cult Emblem (original) (raw)
2019
In the past two centuries, thousands of seals from the ancient Near East have been discovered. Used to authenticate and secure goods and documents, these objects were usually made of semi-precious stone, often engraved with iconography and the bearer’s name or office. Unsurprisingly, many of these ‘signatures’ of the ancients have been alleged to identify or to have belonged to persons mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. In this regard, a 2004 study adapted from a doctoral thesis by Lawrence Mykytiuk is of particular interest, as it has produced the most systematically rigorous verification criteria for determining the probability that an inscription identifies a biblical person. Application of Mykytiuk’s criteria to the current (Sept 2019) corpus of Hebrew seals and bullae is found to yield what are, at least, 24 artifacts that can be confirmed as “reliable” to “virtually certain” to identify a group of 15 biblical persons living up to the time of the Babylonian destruction in 587 BCE. This thesis examines this set of seals and bullae with the aim of answering two questions: What is the significance of the iconography that adorns them, and what is the collective historical contribution of seals and bulla identifying biblical persons? First, this thesis argues that these objects chiefly reveal an iconographic propensity for solar imagery. Interpretation of this imagery indicates that before Josiah there was a tradition in the Judahite royal court of symbolizing Yahweh through these solar motifs. A dominating switch to purely epigraphic seals in the reign of Josiah probably became popular for multiple reasons including their capacity to signal literacy, a growing separation of the respective functions of seals and amulets, and an emergent theological preference favoring aniconism. Second, if one assesses those trends of data yielded across multiple objects in this study’s set, four historical conclusions are justified: 1) This set of artifacts reliably confirms the historicity of 15 biblical persons spanning the eighth to sixth centuries. 2) This set attests to the names of at least 10 persons otherwise unknown to history serving in known reigns of the royal courts of Israel and Judah. 3) The bullae in this set contribute to our understanding of what are probably 3 burnt administrative manuscript archives in the City of David in close proximity of the Temple Mount. Finally, 4) as noted in relation to question 1, these seals exceptionally contribute to our historical understanding of First Temple theology by demonstrating the use of divine iconicity among biblically attested members of the royal court.