Yesterday, some of the Tanakhophile blogs and e-mail lists had a small buzz over an article in Ha’aretz anticipating the publication in Biblical Archaeology Review of an article by Marjo Korpel arguing that a particular ancient Israelite artifact was a seal belonging to the (in)famous biblical queen Jezebel. I blogged about this yesterday and provided a number of links to other bloggers’ discussions.

Last night, Marjo was kind enough to point out to me that those of us blogging and e-discussing the Ha’aretz report got so focused on the newspaper (which most of us can only access online, not in print) and the forthcoming BAR article that we overlooked Marjo’s previously-published, peer-reviewed article on this topic: “Seals of Jezebel and other women in authority,” Journal for Semitics 15/2 (2006): 349–371. Unfortunately, my library does not carry Journal for Semitics (James Wiser, if you’re reading this, let’s fix that!), but a PDF scan of the article is available on the Oudtestamentish Werkgezelschap web site.

Marjo’s discussion of the YZBL seal is on pp. 358–362. She offers six (brief) arguments in favor of connecting this seal with the biblical Jezebel.

1. The size of the signet is exceptionally large (31x22x10 mm) which points to a very wealthy owner.

2. The graceful Egypto-Phoenician style points to a very wealthy owner who apparently loved this type of art, a circumstance tallying with the fact that Jezebel was a Phoenician princess (1 Kings 16:31) who according to biblical tradition did certainly not renounce her native religion (1 Kings 18:19) and lived in a palace adorned with the well-known Samaria ivories. The form of the letters on the signet, especially the Yod, is Phoenician or imitates Phoenician writing. [fn: A. Lemaire, "Divinités égyptiennes dans l'onomastique phénicienne," in: C. Bonnet et al. (eds.), Studia Phoenicia, t. 4; Religio Phoenicia, Namur: Société des Études Classiques, 97.]

3. The winged sphinx, winged sun disk and especially the falcon are well-known symbols of royalty in Egypt.

4. The double uraeus (cobra) was a typical symbol of queens from the eighteenth dynasty onwards. Of course we might suppose that a commoner appropriated the royal iconography. This happened in Egypt itself, and we know that it also occurred in Israel, especially among people who in this way wanted to express their closeness to the throne. However, no examples of a pair of uraei are known to me, with one exception to which I shall return presently. So, independent of the name of the owner, the iconography definitely suggests a queen.

5. The flower at the bottom of the seal might be a rose or lotus, pointing to a vain lady, which Jezebel was (cf. Song 2:1 and 2 Kings 9:30). Egyptian queens were often depicted with flowers.

6. The seemingly different spelling of her name is a mistake on the part of Avigad which as far as I know nobody has noticed hitherto. Especially this latter point merits elaboration. (Korpel, pp. 359–360)

Marjo does go on to elaborate on the name, but let me comment on points 1–5 first. I do not have any formal training, nor really extensive reading, in this area of seals and epigraphy, so my judgments should be taken as those of an “informed amateur.” With that caveat, it does seem to me that Marjo’s items 1–4 do make a plausible prima facie case for a royal or at least noble owner of the signet. I’ll come back to the paleography from item 2 a bit later. Item 5 seems quite weak to me, though it might have a little weight in a cumulative case.

Item 6 is of considerable importance. The actual seal has a large chip out of it at the top. The vertical spacing of the four extant letters (יזבל) leads Korpel to postulate that two other letters (לא) stood at the top, yielding לאיזבל, “belonging to Jezebel,” in agreement with the biblical spelling of Jezebel’s name. I mentioned yesterday why I find the reconstruction of a ל plausible. Very importantly, other seals or seal impressions exist that show the ל in exactly the same pattern of distribution on the face of the seal (see the figures at the end of the PDF; the image quality is poor but unmistakable). Given this evidence and reasoning, I think the reconstruction of a ל in the broken section is not only plausible, but highly likely.

The א, however, presents more serious problems. The very idea of supplying any consonant at all between the ל and the י presupposes that such a consonant is missing, and that supposition seems to be motivated by an a priori assumption that the seal should be associated with Jezebel. In her article, Marjo addresses the issue brought up on the Biblical Studies Discussion List yesterday by Philip Davies, and she quotes the same lines from the Ugaritic Ba‘al epic to which Duane pointed yesterday. On the e-mail list, Aren Maier had mentioned a possible meaning of “Where is Zebul?”, and Marjo points to similar Hebrew personal names in the Bible—איוב, interpreted as “Where is (the divine) father?”; איכבוד, “Where is (the divine) glory?”; and איעזר, “Where is (the divine) help?”—as well as Ugaritic איבעל, “Where is Ba‘al?” Thus the form איזבל is not particularly objectionable as an ancient Phoenician name or, rather, an ancient Hebraicization of a Phoenician name.

Marjo further defends her identification with Jezebel on the basis that the question אי זבל in the Ugaritic epic is addressed to Ba‘al’s paramour Anat. She also tries to connect the Egyptian iconography with Isis and Nephtys. If these arguments be accepted, then the identification of the seal with a woman is strengthened. I must say that I do not find these arguments particularly strong; they slightly enhance the cumulative case. Finally, Korpel argues that it is unlikely for any other queen of Israel to have the theophoric זבל in her name, and in a footnote she therefore disagrees with Larry Mykytiuk, who wrote that “an ornate seal inscribed only ‘Jezebel’ did not necessarily belong to the biblical Jezebel … Perhaps it belong to another wealthy woman who happened to have the same name.”

As I have noted above, some parts of Marjo’s argument are persuasive. Others smack of begging the question of Jezebel’s historical existence, and under that name. Marjo has shown that the name איזבל is morphologically plausible. She has not shown that it is plausible for any woman to have borne it; all the comparable examples she gives are masculine names. Also, Marjo (and just about everyone else) seems to have presupposed that the זבל on the seal represents a theophoric element in the individual’s name, without having considered (in print) alternatives. (Maybe Larry did that in his book; I don’t own a copy, to my chagrin, and neither does my library, to its shame.) If the זבל element is a theophoric unit, then one must make sense of the initial י. This is quite difficult unless one supplies an additional consonant before the י, or assumes that the name is misspelled. One must then ask what additional consonant would make sense. Marjo has shown that supplying an initial א would make good sense, yielding איזבל, “Where is Zebul?” or “Where is the lofty one?” or something along those lines. I don’t know enough about Phoenician vocabulary to make a strong argument here, but just going by Hebrew vocabulary, I could also conceive of מיזבל, “Who is the lofty one?” (compare מיכאל/מישאל, “Who is like El?”) as a possibility. Marjo writes that “zbl is not an element of Hebrew personal names, where as it is attested in Canaanite names” (p. 362), but that objection (a)assumes that Jezebel is the only Phoenician or Canaanite whose seal might show up on the Israeli antiquities market—remember that the seal is unprovenanced—and (b) is just plain wrong, as a quick listing of the twelve tribes of Israel should remind anyone, not to mention the obscure character זבל, ruler of Shechem in Judges 9—at least I think the narrative in Judges presupposes Shechem to be an Israelite city.

“But wait!”, you might object. “The letters זבל in Zebulun don’t represent the theophoric element ‘Zebul.’” Precisely—and that raises the question of why we assume that the letters זבל on the seal in question represent a theophoric element “Zebul.” (There is of course the frequent plene spelling of Zebulun to consider, but nevertheless, it opens the door to the question.) As a matter of fact, it seems to me that, although as far as I know not attested anywhere, יזבל makes perfect sense as a name all by itself. Elsewhere in biblical Hebrew, the forms זְבֻל and מִזְּבֻל relate to a “lofty abode,” and specifically the “lofty abode” of the God of Israel (see 1 Kings 8:13; Isa 63:15; Hab 3:11; Ps 49:15; and so on). The theoretical Hebrew verbal root זבל thus seems to mean something like “exalt, elevate.” If so, then יזבל (“he exalts” or “he is exalted”) could be a name following the pattern of יעקב (“he ‘grasps the heel’”) and יצחק (“he laughs”)—from which, incidentally, some scholars “reconstruct” allegedly “original” names with an אל theophoric element, like יעקבאל and יצחקאל. Be that as it may, the point stands: if one simply reconstructs a lone ל in the chipped area of the יזבל seal, one need not supply any other consonants in order to form a good proper noun that has nothing to do with Jezebel.

Thus, while Marjo has made a good case for the owner of the seal to be royalty or nobility, and while reconstructing a ל in the chipped-off space is entirely reasonable, I am not really convinced that the owner of the seal was female, nor that the owner’s name was איזבל, let alone whether the owner was the biblical Jezebel, if she ever existed and used that name herself. (I have no doubt that King Ahab had one or more wives, but whether any of them were Phoenician princesses known to her contemporaries, as opposed to later critics, as “Jezebel” is quite unproven.) There’s just a bit too much question-begging here for me to feel confident in the reconstruction.

During the time when I was writing all of the above, an essay by Chris Rollston appeared on the American Schools of Oriental Research web site. I have immense respect for Chris both personally and professionally, and therefore I give serious weight to his perspectives on epigraphic matters. Chris notes, as I did above, that the root זבל is not as rare in biblical Hebrew names as Marjo’s article suggests; he also notes, as did Marjo, its attestation in Phoenician and other West Semitic names. Chris further points to the lack of any patronymic (“son of PN” or “daughter of PN”) or title as making identification of the seal’s יזבל[…] with any particular person.

Chris is a skilled epigraher (unlike me), and he finds several aspects of the script that militate against a 9th-century date (which would be required for the seal to belong to Queen Jezebel). Specifically, the stance of the beth (recumbent, or lying over on its side) suggests a later period, as does the shape of the yodh. Similarly, the shape of the zayin, specifically the vertical stroke, suggests to Chris’s eye a late 8th-century or early 7th-century script rather than a 9th-century script, and the same is true of the very angular lamedh as compared with the curvy lamedhs of the 9th-century and early 8th-century inscriptions. Following André Lemaire, Marjo suggested that the script was Phoenician-style; Chris agrees that the shapes of the yodh and the lamedh are more characteristic of Phoenician than Hebrew, but not the beth, which he considers critical. Chris anticipates the objection that the engraver had to fudge the beth because of space constraints, and he rejects this idea because other engravers did just fine within similar constraints. Thus, Chris concludes that if the seal is authentic, it must be from a later time period than that assigned in the Bible to Ahab’s wife Jezebel.

My fellow “armchair epigraphers” might want to see for themselves. Contrast the curvy lamedhs on the 9th- or 8th-century Aramaic Tel Dan stele (use Bill Schniedewind’s drawing if you need greater clarity) with the angular lamedhs on the seal shown above, and then compare both with the very angular lamedhs on the 6th-century Hebrew Lachish ostraca (letter 2 or letter 3, for example).

Further, Chris agrees that restoring a ל is reasonable, but he questions the restoration of the other consonant. The restoration of an א is convenient for Marjo’s case, but it is not really supported by any other evidence. Earlier in this post, I suggested a possible reading that restores nothing but a ל, and another that involved a מ instead of an א; in his paper, Chris suggests some other reconstructions that involve additional letters. The point is not really to put forward any one of these theses as a specific competing interpretation, but to show that there are quite a variety of possibilties that Marjo’s article does not evaluate.

Chris concludes: “Ultimately, this is an interesting proposal, but it is based on no real compelling evidence.” Given the available data and the range of possibilities, I must agree with Chris’s judgment.