A nuclear scientist buys a suspect seal impression in the flea market. It's real, study finds: An official's smaller, cruder copy of the roaring lion seal of Jeroboam II, king of ancient Israel
In the early 1980s, Prof. Yigal Ronen, a nuclear engineer from Ben-Gurion University and amateur antiquities collector, visited the Bedouin market in Be'er Sheva. There he was offered a tiny clay lump stamped with the image of a roaring lion and ancient Hebrew writing. Mechanical Face Seals
The imagery on the bulla, or seal impression, was easily recognizable. It looked like an impression, albeit a smaller, crude one, of the Megiddo seal.
This was an artifact, discovered by archaeologists in the early 20th century that was once the royal stamp used by a high official in the court of King Jeroboam II, who ruled over the Kingdom of Israel in the eighth century B.C.E.
The original seal, found among the ruins of Megiddo in northern Israel, was so famous in modern Israel that its imagery had been stamped on the half-shekel coin issued in 1980. Ronen suspected the clay bulla he was being offered was a forgery inspired by the ancient seal and the modern coinage. Still, he bought the seal impression for a paltry ten shekels (US$ 2.70) just in case it turned out to be something else.
Some 40 years later it turns out that it really was something else: not a forgery, but the oldest known seal impression with ancient Hebrew writing on it. True, it isn't an impression of the Megiddo seal itself, but it's from the same time and has the same imagery.
A team of researchers subjected the minuscule artifact, measuring just 23 by 19 millimeters (0.9 by 0.7 inches) to a battery of scientific tests, many of which had not yet even been developed when the bulla surfaced in Be'er Sheva. And although unprovenanced artifacts from the antiquities market are always suspect, the scientists found no evidence of forgery, the team reports in a recent paper published in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University. (An earlier report on their research was published in the Hebrew journal Eretz Israel in 2021).
"You cannot prove with certainty that something is authentic, but you can prove a forgery, and this passes all the tests," meaning it's most likely not fake, says Ben-Gurion University's Prof. Yuval Goren, an expert in applying advanced scientific methods to archaeological finds with a long track record in sniffing out forgeries.
The original seal from Megiddo, the ancient site known in Christian tradition as Armageddon, has itself a weird and fascinating history. Found in 1904 by the expedition led by U.S. archaeologist Gottlieb Schumacher, the jasper artifact bore the symbol of the roaring lion and the inscription "L'Shema eved Yerovam" – belonging to Shema, servant of Jeroboam.
The layers in which it was found were dated to the eighth century B.C.E. and linked to the Assyrian destruction of the Israelite city. This indicated that the seal belonged to an official in the administration of Jeroboam II, who, according to the Bible, ruled for 41 years over Israel in the first half of the eighth century B.C.E. and is believed by many scholars to have brought the kingdom to the peak of its prosperity, a few decades before its fall to the expanding Assyrian Empire.
The iconography also confirmed that the Jeroboam in question was in fact the king, as the roaring lion was a symbol of royal power that Israel and Judah had adopted from Assyrian culture.
In Mesopotamia this symbol also represented the goddess Ishtar. Many scholars think that in Israel and Judah, the lion may have also been a stand-in for the main Israelite deity, Yahweh.
By the way, the Jeroboam II mentioned throughout this story should not be confused with the first ruler by this name, the founder of the Kingdom of Israel who according to the Bible broke away from the Davidic throne and the Kingdom of Judah sometime in the late 10th century B.C.E. The historicity of Jeroboam I remains lost in the mists of time, along with the broader question of whether the great united monarchy of his predecessors, David and Solomon, really existed.
Still, the Shema seal was an extraordinary find. It was and remains the oldest known Hebrew royal seal and an early confirmation of the historical existence of a character featured in the Bible.
At the time of the discovery, Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire and Schumacher sent the seal to the sultan in Istanbul as a gift, where it subsequently disappeared from the collection of the Topkapi Palace. Its location remains unknown. Fortunately, the archaeologist made photographs, plaster casts and a bronze replica of the artifact before packing it off to Istanbul, which is how it's possible to compare it to the bulla that surfaced at the Be'er Sheva market.
The seal impression bears the same inscription as the original seal, although the letters are a bit smudged and not all of them fully transferred onto the clay. The bulla is also about half the size of the Megiddo seal, and the lion image is of a lesser artistic quality, displaying fewer details.
This means that it was clear from the start that even if the bulla was authentic, it was not made from the original Shema seal but from a copy, explains Shmuel Ahituv, a retired professor of Bible and ancient near eastern studies at Ben-Gurion and the lead author on the study.
The team conducted a series of lab tests including petrographic analysis, which showed the clay in the bulla was typical of the Galilee and the Golan Heights, the region that includes Megiddo and was the heartland of the ancient Kingdom of Israel.
Scanning by electron microscope detected no modern materials, such as adhesives, that one might find in a forgery, Ahituv and colleagues report. Moreover, the team detected a patina: an accumulation of calcite that is often taken as a sign that an ancient artifact is authentic.
Now, a patina is similar to the layer of calcite that accumulates at the bottom of a kettle. It can be faked, Goren cautions. However, scientists have ways of determining whether an object's patina formed over centuries or millennia in natural conditions or was created artificially in a lab at high temperatures, he tells Haaretz by phone.
In the case of the Shema bulla, isotopic analysis of the oxygen and carbon in the patina showed normal values in terms of temperature and natural water composition for the Galilee over the past 3,000 years, the researchers found. Further strengthening the case for authenticity is the fact that most of these tests didn't exist when the bulla was bought in Be'er Sheva, so a potential forger would not have had any knowledge of how to possibly get around them, Goren explains.
Do you have a receipt?
The researchers were also able to determine that the seal impression was a "fiscal bulla" – a type used by the royal administration in Israel and Judah to seal shipments of tax in kind. We know this because bullae affixed on documents bear impressions on their backs of papyri and threads. But the back of this seal impression displays the faint crisscross pattern of a linen cloth, possibly a sack that contained whatever produce was being rendered onto the king as a tax payment, Ahituv says.
The tests showed the clay bulla was also baked at a high temperature, which is probably why it survived until today, and this was normally done for fiscal bullae because they functioned as a kind of receipt:, evidence that needed to be preserved to show that tax had been paid, Goren notes.
The tests also confirmed that the bulla originated in the north of Israel and only made its way to Be'er Sheva, in the south of the country, in modern times, he adds.
While the fact that the bulla surfaced on the antiquities market leaves us in the dark on much of its context, these details give us some insight into its story and why there seems to have been multiple (or at least two) Shema seals.
"Shema must have been a very high-placed official, possibly the equivalent of a prime minister or treasurer," Ahituv notes. "He likely had other officials under him, and they received a copy of his seal, so that the minister didn't have to sit and sign every tax receipt he gave out."
As such, the bulla gives us insight into the complexities of the ancient Israelite administration, the researchers say.
Even on its own, it is an almost unheard of find. Several bullae bearing the names of biblical kings and characters have been unearthed, though these tend to be from slightly later and from the Kingdom of Judah, such as the bullae of King Hezekiah and the Prophet Isaiah, which date to the end of the eighth century B.C.E.
Very few seal impressions from the Kingdom of Israel have been found and Shema's is the oldest known Hebrew bulla, just like its "parent" seal is the oldest known seal, Ahituv and colleagues say.
If indeed the bulla is from a scaled-down version of the seal from Megiddo, then this is also the first time we encounter an imprint from a known seal in this period, they write.
No such pairing exists in the Levant and the only example from the broader Near East is the seal of Tashmetum-Sharrat, wife of King Sennacherib of Assyria, of which we have four impressions, they note.
A chip off the old lion
The Shema seal impression is now in the hands of the Israel Antiquities Authority and will likely go on display at Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Goren says.
"At first glance, if you looked at this seal impression you would say: 'of course it's a forgery, it's too good to be true'," says Stefan Münger, a professor of Jewish studies at the University of Bern in Switzerland. However, the scholars who conducted the tests are "top notch" and the results of the scientific analysis are hard to argue with, says Münger, who did not take part in the study.
There is however still one lingering doubt, says Münger, who is one of the leading researchers in an international project that studies stamp seals from the Southern Levant.
In the copy and photographs of the original Megiddo seal there is small chip or hole that is visible directly under the chest of the lion, a tiny area that was probably damaged already in antiquity. The chip has no iconographic meaning – it is simply a defect, Münger tells Haaretz. And yet that same defect appears in the seal impression from Be'er Sheva, even though we know that this imprint must have been made from a smaller copy of the original artifact.
How could both seals carry the same defect? This could support the scenario that a modern forger created the bulla, copying the chip in the original seal because he was unaware that it was a defect, he says.
"The guy who copied this mistook this element and thought it was part of the iconography," Münger says. On the other hand, the tests support the artifact's authenticity, he adds. "It all fits perfectly, so this a bit of a conundrum."
One possibility is that the Shema seal was indeed copied in antiquity and whoever did it reproduced the defect, either by mistake or because the image needed to be fully reproduced (damage included) for the new seal to be considered authentic, he says.
hydraulic shaft seals "Maybe if you had to authenticate the seal of an official you had to copy it 100 percent," Münger says. "If true, that in itself would be an amazing story. This is truly a fascinating object."