As if to prove Terje Oestigaard’s point, Israel Today reported today:

Israeli archeologists on Monday unveiled a number of signet rings believed to be from the time of the biblical kings David and Solomon.

The artifacts were found during ongoing digs in the City of David, a crowded Jewish and Arab neighborhood just south of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

The area encompassed by the City of David constituted the whole of Jerusalem in King David’s time. The Arabs refer to the neighborhood as Silwan.

The newly discovered evidence of Israeli rule in Jerusalem during the biblical period was displayed at a conference marking the 40th anniversary of the reunification of the city.

Why stage the presentation of Iron Age artifacts at a political event celebrating the modern state of Israel, if not to try to suggest some sort of cultural, ethnic, or even (as absurd as it sounds) political continuity between the inhabitants of Iron Age Jerusalem and modern Israelis? The Israel Today “staff writer” attempted to make this explicit, with the absurd remark about “Israeli rule in Jerusalem during the biblical period.”

A longer report appeared today on the Arutz Sheva web site. The Arutz Sheva story mentioned several details not reported by Israel Today. According to the Arutz Sheva writer, Nissan Ratzlav-Katz, over 100 seals went on display. These seals were “found at the Beit HaMaayan (well-house) dig, overseen by Haifa University’s Archaeology Department Director, Professor Ronny Reich.” Ratzlav-Katz repeated the claim that these seals come from “the time of the reigns of Kings David and Solomon,” and added that Reich et al. inferred that the “large number of such seals … indicate that the City of David area was a commercial and trading center.”

Instead of providing any photographs, drawings, or transcriptions of the lettering on any of the seals, or even explaining the process by which the archaeologists arrived at a “Davidic-Solomonic” date for the seals, Ratzlav-Katz focused the second half of the article on other seals, specifically, the Yehucal seal that Eilat Mazar’s dig uncovered in 2005 and the previously-known Gemaryahu seal.

I wonder if any of these “seals” were the same bullae mentioned by Todd Bolen back in February.

Hat tip to Jim West for pointing to these reports. I have not been able to find any other information about the seals. It should go without saying that I am reserving judgment until I learn more about the seals themselves, not just the circumstances of their public display.