An elliptical stone seal 2.1 cm long and 1.8 cm wide has grabbed headlines, and all because the name inscribed thereupon might appear in the Bible.

Yesterday (Wednesday, January 16), the Jerusalem Post reported on Eilat Mazar’s little treasure. With fanfare and misstatement, the Post trumpeted, “First Temple seal found in Jerusalem”! The editors should have called it a “templeless seal,” assuming that Mazar’s date range of 538–445 BCE holds. (The Post gave no details about how Mazar dated the seal, nor do I know of any other source providing such information at this time.) Since the seal apparently depicts worshipers offering incense to a deity symbolized by a crescent moon—the Babylonian moon god Sin is the odds-on favorite here—the only temple with which this seal has any plausible connection would be way over in Babylon, not in Jerusalem. While the biblical descriptions of “Solomon’s temple” may exaggerate its grandeur, surely nobody doubts that Jerusalem had a temple of some sort in Iron Age II. But the Babylonians reportedly demolished that site in 586 BCE, and any connection between this seal and that Iron II temple requires several generations of imaginative stretching, on the very most generous interpretation of the data.

A Persian-era seal found in Jerusalem’s environs may not get you all excited, but the seal bears an inscription, presumably a personal name. Here the story really does get quite interesting, with a flurry of early debate on how we ought to read the inscription. The Post confidently reports Mazar’s own interpretation as established fact:

Under this scene are three Hebrew letters spelling Temech, Mazar said.

The Bible refers to the Temech family: “These are the children of the province, that went up out of the captivity, of those that had been carried away, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away, and came again to Jerusalem and to Judah, every one unto his city.” [Nehemiah 7:6]… “The Nethinim [7:46]“… The children of Temech.” [7:55].

The fact that this cultic scene relates to the Babylonian chief god seemed not to have disturbed the Jews who used it on their own seal, she added.

The seal of one of the members of the Temech family was discovered just dozens of meters away from the Opel area, where the servants of the Temple, or “Nethinim,” lived in the time of Nehemiah, Mazar said.

“The seal of the Temech family gives us a direct connection between archeology and the biblical sources and serves as actual evidence of a family mentioned in the Bible,” she said. “One cannot help being astonished by the credibility of the biblical source as seen by the archaeological find.”

Mazar reads the inscription right to left. The two rightmost characters unambiguously are tav (farthest to the right) and mem. The reading grows more difficult as one moves to the left. Mazar apparently interprets the vertical stroke just to the left of the mem as the rightmost stroke of a ḥet. If you follow Mazar in this, you can then perceive two horizontal strokes joining the just-mentioned downstroke to another vertical stroke, yielding something resembling a ḥet, with an anomalous vertical stroke hanging off to the left of that ḥet. If you understood that explanation, you can easily see where Mazar gets the reading תמח, “Temech.”

Writing on the ANE-2 e-mail list, Peter van der Veen disagrees with Mazar’s reading. If you examine the figures below, you can easily see why. Engravers normally put the letters on a seal backwards, so that the seal impression in clay would show the letters in their correct orientation. A reversed tav might not immediately grab your attention, but a reversed mem practically shouts, “Hey, read me in the mirror!” Chris Rollston put it this way in an e-mail he sent to me and to Jim West (and perhaps others):

There has been much discussion about Mazar’s seal, in particular the direction in which it should be read (and thus whether it is written in mirror image). This is a very easy thing for a palaeographer to determine: the issue that is determinative is the stance of the mem. Thus, I can state with absolute certitude that it is written in mirror image. There can be no question about this. That is, this definitely does NOT read tmk (i.e., the tav is the final letter, not the first).

If you read the seal in mirror-image, as van der Veen and Rollston insist, then the leftmost marks look like overlapping Vs, yielding a Hebrew shin. The vertical mark just to the right of the shin could plausibly be thought a lamed. Thus van der Veen reads the inscription as שלמת, perhaps to be vocalized “Shelomith.”

 

Each reading must explain certain anomalies: Mazar must explain the extra vertical stroke at the “end” of the name, and van der Veen must explain the odd-looking lamed consisting of a purely vertical stroke (as far as the admittedly low-resolution photos reveal). I command only very amateurish epigraphy skills (therefore, I normally trust Chris Rollston’s judgment on epigraphic matters like I trust my own eyesight when driving), but it seems to me that a simplified lamed is easier to explain than an anomalous line belonging to none of the characters. Moreover, anybody can plainly see that the mem stands backwards and should be read in mirror image.

Now, what about the alleged biblical connection, which garners the story extra attention? The Jerusalem Post quotes Mazar as saying, “One cannot help being astonished by the credibility of the biblical source as seen by the archaeological find.” Give me a break. You’d think she found a videotape of Ezra cantillating the Torah. Suppose that Mazar correctly reads the inscription as תמח. The name תמח does indeed appear in a list of the Bible—precisely twice, with reference to the same individual, in a list of “temple servants” (Ezra 2:53 // Nehemiah 7:55). Mazar hasn’t adduced a shred of evidence to connect that תמח with the biblical תמח—nor could anyone expect her to do so, since all we know about the biblical תמח is his name and (possibly) occupation. Without knowing how common the name תמח was among Judeans of the relevant period, we have no way even to put a probability figure on the seal’s תמח being the biblical תמח.

But Mazar reads the name backwards anyway, so what of שלמת? As Yitzhak Sapir pointed out on the Biblical Studies Discussion List, the name שלומית—take out the matres lectiones and you get שלמת—appears in another “returnee list” (Ezra 8:10). Actually, several biblical individuals, both male and female, bear names that would be spelled, without matres lectiones, as שלמת; see Leviticus 24:11 (a woman), 1 Chronicles 3:19 (a woman); 23:9 (a man), 18 (a man); 26:25 (a man); 2 Chronicles 11:20 (unclear). (Never mind the שולמית of Song 6:13.) If שלמת is the correct reading (it’s undoubtedly closer than Mazar’s, but I remain curious about the proposed lamedh), the chances of connecting the seal to any specific individual named in the Bible diminish rapidly.

In either event, the picture casts aspersions on שלמת’s claim to be a pious monotheistic Yahwist, if such a claim be pressed for that individual. This probably troubles Mazar’s waters more than van der Veen’s, since she puts forward the תמח family as belonging to the guild of temple servants.

This seal expands our pool of data for paleographic and iconographic studies of ancient Judah—and not much else. The seal doesn’t “confirm” anything in the Bible; at most, it tells us that שלמת (or תמח, if Mazar’s longshot comes through) was a proper name really used in Iron II or Persian-era Judah. I don’t think anybody every really doubted that the names in Ezra’s list of returnees were realistic. To say, with Mazar, that this seal belonged to that תמח would seriously overstate the evidence even if the seal really did read תמח at all.

See also Jim West’s and Todd Bolen’s posts on the seal. Jim Davila’s really just points to the Post article. Maybe if we could get Jim Getz or Jim Spinti or Jim Pate (yes, I know some of these prefer “James,” but I’m making a point here) to post on the topic, we could finally get the message through that “Name X” on a seal and “Name X” in the Bible doesn’t mean that the biblical X owned the seal.