Yitzhak Sapir posted the following on the ANE-2 mailing list. I reprint Yithak’s comments here with his permission. At Yitzhak’s request, I have included some images to illustrate his points about the mem. I’ve taken the liberty of cleaning up some formatting for presentation here, and I have “hidden” URLs within actual links, but otherwise I have not changed any of Yitzhak’s text.

Christopher Heard already wrote about what he calls Byrne’s rush to judgement in identifying this seal as a woman’s seal here. He echoes the remarks of Stefan Scorch here.

I would like to deal with three other points. I would like to point
out that I’m not an epigrapher, and would not try to make judgments on either epigraphy or iconography. I am just a list reader trying to understand the points that Byrne made. I don’t know if I would call them a rush to judgment. On the other hand, to the best of my judgment, in view of the resouces I have at hand, I think some others of Byrne’s claims can be ruled out.

Byrne writes: “For the corpus of stamp seals with female names, I am
sad to report that the Šlomit seal from Jerusalem (to my current knowledge) is only the third published, provenanced specimen in West Semitic prior to the Persian period.”

This seems incorrect. First, I don’t know if its appearance on the BAR website is considered publication, but in any case, it seems to me that Mazar seems to view this as such. Moreover, this is not the third published provenanced specimen prior to the Persian period. At least two more seals, beyond those that Byrne lists, are known from Ammonite
sites — they read:

l(lyh )mt xnn)l: la`eliyah servant-woman of Hanan’el from Amman
l(nmwt )mt dblbs: la`anamawt servant-woman of dblbs from Irbid

They are both dealt with in Aufrecht, Corpus of Ammonite Inscriptions, p. 85–88, and 110–113, according to Ahituv’s handbook where they appear on p 244 in the first Hebrew edition (the second edition removed the seals). They were both published already in the 1940s.

Also, he seems to guess that the date of the seal is informed primarily by Mazar’s attempt to place this seal in Babylon and the period of return. More likely, however, it is based on a combined assessment by Mazar based on the pottery in the stratified layer where the seal was found and secondly, on her conclusion that she is digging up a layer of the period of the return. In view of this, if one wants to date this seal prior to the Persian period, one must provide clear grounds based on other published provenanced seals. I don’t see Byrne doing this — he just notes parallels in the late 7th and early 6th centuries, but does not rule out a 5th or late 6th century dating. Also, I note Peter van der Veen’s statement that either a 6th or 5th century date is possible. I think therefore, that Byrne’s conclusion that this seal must predate the Persian period is also to some degree premature, although it may in the end turn out to be a reasonable suggestion. This is one of the results of dealing with not fully published specimens. If the seal were fully published, one could understand how much the Persian dating is supported by the pottery and stratigraphy, and how much it is rests purely on Mazar’s subjective opinions.

He also makes a comment about seals being sometimes associated with
males of high office, suggesting it is wrong. I think it is probable that some women held office and therefore had seals, but this was generally rare in a patriarchal society. I am not sure if this is what he means to say, though.

Now on the epigraphy, Byrne notes some oddities in the mem — that the three strokes stand independent of any horizontal stroke and that a fourth stroke is used to construct the tail cutting throw the rightmost vertical stroke (leftmost stroke in the seal, but rightmost in the small photo near the mem commentary). Byrne explains this as a result of the characteristics of the stone, but in fact no explanation is necessary. The four strokes that Byrne notes are in fact simply the edges of the incisions. The dark shadows that form the insides of the incisions are still barely visible in the poor quality photo that is provided besides Byrne’s mem commentary but they are clearly visible in the large scale photo that accompanies the series of articles in the BAR website. From the large scale photo it is clear that what Byrne calls four strokes is in fact three strokes that make for an ordinary mem. Part of the upper portion of the long left stroke may be chipped, and may contribute to the look of the letter as constructed from four vertical strokes, but this clearly appears to be not the case from the large scale photo. Also, Byrne notes the absence of a horizontal stroke but such a stroke is visible in the photo. It looks a little bit like a smudge, but so do many horizontal strokes in the photo — including the hook of the lamed, the horizontal stroke of the taw, the altar’s horizontal strokes, the left worshipper’s outstretched arm and feet. Even the crescent at the top appears to reach a smudgelike shape when it becomes horizontal suggesting that it is the lighting, not the scribe or the stone, that is to blame for this smudgelike appearance. See also how the mem‘s horizontal smudge-line breaks up the middle vertical stroke. I therefore echo G. M. Grena’s request for more photos in different lighting. I am not offering here any alternative suggestion for the epigraphy, just noting that in my opinion, some of Byrne’s comments regarding the epigraphy of the mem simply seem not to match what I see in the large scale photo. His other comments may be correct.

Finally, on the iconography, I note the following comments from
Studies in the Iconography of NWS Inscribed Seals, by Benjamin Sass and Christoph Ühlinger, published 1993, from a conference in 1991. First, the book provides some good drawings of other scenes with two worshippers, often with a crescent and an altar, produced in Ornan’s article in the book. The captions are [here].

The “Ezra” seal that was mentioned here is seal 59. Note the following comments by Sass, p. 196: “Iconography is apt to be adopted and shared (cf. supra, the contributions by Parayre and Ornan), a case in point being two worshippers facing each other, an altar or another object between them. This scene is considered by some to be characteristically Transjordanian, while epigraphy is equivocal enough to permit an Aramaic and perhaps Hebrew attribution (see GGG: §§177, 185; below subject F5).[3] This means that in classifying anepigraphic seals too, iconography has weighty limits.”

“[3] Intuitively this scene may look un-Hebrew indeed: ‘So far, not a single seal was found, that can be securely identified as Hebrew and which carries a pagan cult scene of this sort, and it is unlikely that such a seal will ever be found in the future” (Avigad 1977b: 108, about the seal of Ezra, cf. Ornan, supra p. 67, fig 59 [the above drawings of the seals]). But in view of the humans and divine and semi-divine figures represented, albeit rarely, on Hebrew seals, this scene too is not impossible.”

Later, p. 231-2, he writes, in the section titled “F5 Two men,” “Two worshippers before a plant, offering stand, altar, divine symbol(s), or attribute(s) or a deity were very common in the West Semitic realm, but as depictions of a single worshipper in such a context, they are extremely rare in Hebrew glyptic.

“Only one such seal, in an unusual style, is certainly Hebrew (fig 135). It is an oval bifacial plaque that may have belonged to Hilqiyahu, son of Padi (the legend is much damaged). On the reverse side two men (the owner, doubled?) are kneeling, or dancing, under a palm tree (see motif A1.1).

“Two worshippers flanking a stand(?) and crescent appear on a seal
from Samaria (Ornan, supra, p. 67, fig 56). Only the first letter of the owner’s name, a kap, is well preserved, [88] and the letter could be Hebrew as well as Moabite. The seal belonged to a distinct group (Ornan, supra, p. 68 with figs. 56-65 [apparently a typo for p. 67])
that was probably Aramaean-inspired and may have enjoyed a distribution wider than originally thought (GGG: § 185; Keel 1990c; see also p. 196 above, and note 3; Timm, supra, pp. 180-183).[89]

“[88] Possibly km[...; klm... was restored in Samaria-Sebaste 3: 87,
pl. 15:21, but examination of the original reveals that the legend is almost totally destroyed beyond the first letter.

"[89] An anepigraphic seal showing two human(?) worshippers flanking a Bes(?) figure was found in Hazor Stratum VI (Hazor III-IV: pls. 187:22, 360:4, 5, cf. the corrected drawing in GGG: fig 228).”

I don’t know what it takes for a seal to be considered “certainly”
Hebrew. Script? Name? The name $lmt carries the theophoric component that is present also in the name of the city yrw$lm, and so I would think that such a name would appear perfectly native to Jerusalem. Perhaps others would consider only a Yahwistic name to be “Hebrew.” But this seal probably makes a close call to claiming this designation as anything.

References for the above and p. 73 are:

Avigad, N 1977b “New Moabite and Ammonite Seals in the Israel Museum” EI 13, 108-110, (Hebrew, English summary 294*).

Bordreuil & Lemaire 1976 = Semitica 26: 45-53

B = Bordreuil, Catalogue des sceaux ouest-sémitiques, 1986.

GGG = Göttinen, Götter und Gottessymbole by O. Keel and Ch. Ühlinger, 1992.

Keel, O 1990c “Aramäisch inspirierte Ikonografie aus Palästina” (unpublished lecture manuscript, an updated version of which was to appear in Studien zu den Stempelsiegeln aus Palästina/Israel IV, 1994).

Lemaire 1983 = Semitica 33: 17-31

Lemaire 1990b = Studi epigrafici e linguistici sul Vicino Oriente antico 7: 97-109

Naveh 1982 = Early History of the Alphabet, (the Hebrew version has the Amots scribe in p. 101, fig 89)

Yitzhak Sapir