What would a bulla made by Mazar’s seal look like?
In comments to my first post on the שלמת תמח seal, Jim Randolph wrote: “Looking at the seal in the mirror produces a normally slanted Hebrew text and solves the “mem” problem. In our age of technology can’t someone produce a computerized bulla of the seal? I believe much of the controversy would disappear if this were done.”
The “controversy” seems quite minimal to me—nobody has really argued Mazar’s case against the epigraphers who oppose her reading, but the existence of backward-written stamp/seal impressions from the same chronological horizon in which the שלמת seal was deposited make it hard to absolutely rule out her תמח reading. (As you can tell by the way I phrased that, I agree with Peter, Chris, G.M., Jim, et al. on the correct reading.) Nevertheless, I thought I’d take a stab at honoring Jim’s implicit request. To produce the image shown here, I just flipped the seal horizontally in Photoshop, and changed the colors (and added a disclaimer) in an attempt to avoid any possible confusion with the actual seal. The bulla resulting from an impression of the שלמת seal in clay might have come out very much like this.
2 comments Christopher Heard | archaeology, biblical world
Nice. I actually tried this last night too in a photo program. But I was hoping to make the color of the whole field more uniformly clay-like and then use the “emboss” effect to make the seal look like an impression in clay. But, it didn’t look so good. Still, flipping the image horizontally as you’ve done puts matters into a new perspective (metaphorically, too).
[...] photos with tracings of the two ways of reading the seal, and using more Photosop devilry even produces an image of what a bulla made with the seal would look like. Chris likewise describes his attempts to [...]