Yesterday, Ha’aretz reported that Marjo Korpel will soon argue—in Biblical Archaeology Review—that artifact “IDAM 65-321″ from the Israel Museum collection was once the official seal of Israel’s most infamous queen, Jezebel. The blogosphere and e-mail lists have been abuzz with discussion of Korpel’s claim; see, for example, the comments by Jim West, Jim Davila, Todd Bolen, and Duane Smith, with my apologies to anyone I’ve left out. Jan Pieter van de Giessen actually had the story several weeks ago.

Before we go much farther, here’s a picture of the actual artifact, from the Canadian Museum of Civilization web site:

And now here’s a picture from the Universiteit Utrecht web site, showing Korpel’s proposed reconstruction at the top:

The extant inscription on the actual piece reads יזבל, but Jezebel’s name is spelled איזבל in the Tanakh—hence the need to reconstruct the missing letters. As you can see from the second photo, Korpel proposes to read לאיזבל, which would be the preposition ל (here, “belonging to”) + the proper name איזבל.

One obvious problem, of course, is the big crack in the top of the seal. What letters, if any, used to be there? On his blog, Jim West characterizes Korpel’s reconstruction as “guesswork”; on the Biblical Studies Discussion List, he went further, calling the reconstruction “pure speculation” and “impossible to verify or really even to suggest.” Caution is wise, but Jim’s pronouncements overstate the case. Duane wisely advises that we wait until Korpel’s formal article comes out to assess her claims—I don’t see how we could do otherwise! Nevertheless, I’ll make a couple of observations that will, I think, temper Jim’s dismissal of Korpel’s reconstruction without being overly credulous.

First, it is obvious that the object in question is a seal, meant for making impressions (for those of you who don’t read paleo-Hebrew, the letters are inscribed backwards, so that the impression left by pressing the seal into clay would produce forwards-facing letters—the seal itself is a mirror image of the intended end product). Based on copious evidence from other ancient Israelite and Judean seals and seal impressions, we should expect to find a ל (“belonging to”) somewhere on the seal, preceding the proper noun. This expectation is not conclusive, of course, but it is quite reasonable—and the only place a missing ל could go would be in the broken area at the top of the seal. In my opinion, doubting the ל would be like finding a busted baseball and doubting that it ever had stitches.

The second step is more difficult. Korpel’s reconstruction shows that there is room for a ל plus one other letter in the missing area. If that be so, we only have 23 possibilities for the complete inscription. It might have been ליזבל, with only the ל at the top; or it might have been לאיזבל or לביזבל or לגיזבל or … well, I hope you get the point. There are a finite number of possible readings, and the next step becomes sorting those by their plausibility, which should involve some consideration of attested names and so on.

But that brings up another point. As Jim West points out in a paragraph from Philip Davies, posted to the Biblical Studies Discussion List, there’s a good chance that איזבל is an “invented” or “distorted” name. Here’s what Philip wrote, copied from Jim’s copy:

So the letter/letters at the top of ‘Jezebel’ seal are all missing, leaving YZBL. Since ZBL is a common Phoenician theophoric element (and Y very commonly the preceding letter) what is the statistical probability that the name is ‘YZBL? Can that be worked out? More seriously, the biblical spelling is problematic. It could be a distortion intended to mean ‘Zebul is not’. Can we be sure that it is a genuine Phoenician name? What would it mean?

I do think that the probability of איזבל over against some other reconstruction (ביזבל or גיזבל or דיזבל … there are only 22 possibiities) could be worked out, given sufficient time and attention to attested patterns of Phoenician names. If I were to undertake that personally, I would have to do some homework on Phoenician names, but presumably Korpel has taken this into account (we’ll all find out when the article or more information about her argument appears). It should nevertheless be possible, in principle. As for Philip’s question about whether איזבל could be a genuine Phoenician name (or a genuine Hebraicization of a genuine Phoenician name), Aren Maeir pointed out an interesting possibility. While the biblical—nay, Masoretic—vocalization אִיזֶבֶל suggests “Zebul is not,” with another vocalization, אַיזֶבֶל, the name might suggest “Where is Zebul?” But could that be a genuine Phoenician name? Alas, I don’t know enough about Phoenician names to make that call. However, it is at least interesting that the biblical narrator names Jezebel’s father אֶתְבַּעַל—apparently another combination of a preposition with a theophoric.

I clearly do not know for sure whether the seal belonged to a woman named איזבל or somebody with some other name. I’m eager to read Korpel’s argument. However, I am certainly open to being persuaded—the reconstruction is not at all unreasonable.

Update: Please now see this guest post from Chris Rollston, on Jim West’s blog. Chris gives some important cautions. Most interesting to me was Chris’s assessment that the script is clearly younger than the 9th century, which would remove Ahab’s Jezebel from consideration. Also, as far as I know, we have no historical confirmation of Jezebel’s actual existence—Assyrian inscriptions attest to Ahab, but only the Bible attests to Jezebel, unless I have missed some important bit of information. Before anyone cites the seal itself: it is in question and cannot be used to support the existence of a historical Jezebel, for that would be a circular argument. In fact, it’s hard not to see any argument one could make here as more or less circular: attaching the seal to the biblical Jezebel begs the question of that queen’s existence, and using the seal to prove her existence is flawed because the reconstruction depends on presupposing the name איזבל on the basis of the Bible itself.