A beautiful 2,700-year-old stone seal was recently unearthed near the Southern Wall of the Temple Mount in excavations in the Davidson Archaeological Garden. The black stone seal depicts a winged figure and bears the Paleo-Hebrew inscription “LeYehoʼezer ben Hoshʼayahu.” It has a hole drilled through it from top to bottom so that it could be attached to a chain or worn around one’s neck. The spectacular winged figure contrasts with the inscription, which is relatively sloppy. Scholars hypothesize that the seal once belonged to an important figure in the courts of the kingdom of Judah named Hoshʼayahu and that upon his death, his son, LeYehoʼezer, inscribed his name and his father’s on it. These names appear in the Bible: in 1 Chronicles 12:6, Joezer/Yo’ezer (an abbreviated form of Yeho-ezer) is listed as one of David’s mighty men, and in Jeremiah 43:2, Azariah son of Hoshʼaya (a shortened form of Hoshʼayahu) is one of the insolent men who accuses the prophet Jeremiah of lying. The inscription indicates that these names were used in the Iron Age in the kingdom of Judah as the Bible describes. Furthermore, if it was indeed Yehoʼezer himself who engraved the names on the seal, it is evidence of literacy at this period in Judah’s history.
OFF-SITE LINKS:
- https://www.timesofisrael.com/extremely-rare-beautiful-first-temple-era-genie-seal-discovered-in-jerusalem/
- https://www.jpost.com/archaeology/article-816895
Read more BREAKING NEWS articles here: https://biblearchaeology.org/current-events-list
ADDENDUM: FURTHER COMMENTARY ON THE SEAL
Scott Lanser with Doug Petrovich
I had a most enlightening series of communications with Dr. Douglas Petrovich* about the recent announcement by the Israel Antiquities Authority regarding the discovery of the Yeho’ezer (Yahu-azar) seal. The comments from Doug below are a summary of his important insights and corrections regarding the recent media reports and offer a more complete perspective on this significant discovery:
The news media coverage announcing the discovery of the seal indicated that the handwriting on the seal was poor in quality. We do not know the original source of this opinion, but it is absolutely not true. There is nothing wrong with the handwriting at all. This writing style is very common for the era. Plus, it is tough to compose an ideal letter on an object of such small size—and on stone! Considering those limitations, I would call the handwriting very good to excellent. I think the reason for the statements parroted in the media is that next to the beautiful iconographic imagery on the seal we would expect handwriting just as gorgeous, more like what Egyptian scribes would use with hieroglyphics. But this is just a false expectation.
Further comments from Dr. Petrovich:
The new seal from the City of David National Park in Jerusalem is an amazing find, and as an epigrapher, I wanted to do my own composite work on the best photos available. After I identified all the letters on the Yahu-azar seal, I drew them electronically with PowerPoint (right “on top of” the best photo, to make for an exact drawing), along with all the visible parts of the iconography (feet, garment, wings, etc.). The upper body of the genie is poorly preserved, so I did not speculate with this, but since the crown is partially visible, I did some slightly speculative reconstruction of it from similar Assyrian images. Apart from that partial speculation on the crown, I drew only what I saw with confidence. Someone asked me why the two halves of the man’s name are transposed. English is mostly word-order driven. Ancient Hebrew is more flexible, though it has a default word order of Verb-Subject-Object. Yet this order often was not followed, usually for emphasis of a certain word or phrase (e.g., see “In the beginning” in Gn 1:1). This Judahite’s name consists of a noun and verb, and the order is not binding. Either “He-goes-on-existing has helped” or “Has helped He-goes-on-existing” can work. (Imagine Native American options such as Running Brook vs. Brook That Runs.) Such transposition is not common with a theophoric name, but it certainly should not be shocking or viewed with doubt or opposition.
Here is my response to a specific question about the seal that came to me on LinkedIn after I posted my drawing:
“Dr. Petrovich, could you please elaborate on letter #7, the resh? Seems like an unusual shape for it, so I’m wondering if there are any contemporary parallels. Thanks!”
Yes, it is a “gooey” way of writing the letter, to be sure. The resh-letter here is based on the pictograph (and ultimately the hieroglyph) of a head, because “rosh” is the Hebrew word for “head.” During Egypt’s Middle Kingdom (Joseph’s lifetime and afterward) and New Kingdom (Moses’s lifetime), the letter almost always was composed to resemble a discernible head. We don’t have many extant inscriptions from the period between about 1400 BC and about 1250–1200 BC. During that gap, the way of writing the letter must have changed, because when we get to its form on the Tsartah Ostracon of the 12th century BC, it looks like a lollipop and is virtually indistinguishable from the qof on the same ostracon. For some time, the two letters remained virtually indistinguishable for whatever reason. Later in the Judahite monarchy, the shaft of the resh-letter—representing a torso—apparently disappeared, because it is gone altogether from the uses of this letter on the Siloam Inscription, which must have been incised in about 701 BC. This trend seems to have continued until the Judahites were invaded by the Neo-Babylonians in 587 BC and carted off by Nebuchadnezzar II’s troops. The form of resh on the Siloam Inscription is pretty close to the one we see here. On that inscription, the resh has no shaft, and the head no longer is truly round. It is a variation of round, almost like a triangle with rounded points. Yet with both the resh of the Yahu-azar seal and the resh of the Siloam Inscription, one corner seems to be almost angled. This important nuance gives us a paleographically similar detail to “seal” the comparison. The form of this letter between the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian invasions thus seems to be a noncircular head with no torso and with one nearly angled point (as in a point on a triangle) at one place on the head. Apparently, the shape of the “head” was quite flexible from ca. 750 to 587 BC.
Meiras - own work, Wikimedia Commons, April 29, 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0.
* See his academia.edu page here: https://brookesbible.academia.edu/DouglasPetrovich.
