Speaking at the Herzliya Conference this past weekend, Eilat Mazar presented some of the finds from her Jerusalem excavations, including the attention-getting seal about which I’ve already posted (here, here, and here). The conference structure limited Mazar to a fifteen-minute presentation, so one must make some allowances for what she could have done within this constraint. Of course, other items occupied her agenda besides the seal in question. Having extended these courtesies, though, I find myself completely unimpressed with Mazar’s presentation (Hebrew | English). Throughout, the presentation gave no evidence of any awareness by Mazar of views different from her own, though she must surely know that many archaeologists and historians disagree with her simplistic use of biblical paraphrase as historical reconstruction. With specific regard to the seal, Mazar repeated the same story she gave to the Jerusalem Post, with not even the scantest mention of any reading other than the specious תמח. When this story first broke I tried to be overly cautious in giving Mazar the benefit of every possible doubt, but now I find that generosity quickly slipping away.

One cannot do solid, top-quality epigraphy using photographs (especially not low-resolution shots for the web), but anybody who knows the Phoenician-style script also used for paleo-Hebraic writing can easily see the reversal of the mem. Moreover, it just dawned on me as I watched Mazar’s presentation for the second time that if one accepts Mazar’s claim that the seal was inscribed backward, the stance of the mem and the stance of the ḥet slant in the wrong directions with respect to one another—don’t they? However, if one reads the inscription “naturally” according to seal conventions—in mirror-image—these paleographic difficulties disappear. Other—but much lesser—difficulties remain, such as deciphering the rightmost (as one looks at the seal) marks, but the reading תמח has pretty much nothing left to commend it.