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Some two years ago, Harvard professor Frank Moore Cross published an article in BAR that described for the first time an extraordinary lump of clay.* Known as a bulla, the clay was impressed with a seal belonging to King Hezekiah, who ruled Judah from c. 727-698 B.C.E. It was Hezekiah who saved Jerusalem from a siege by the Assyrian monarch Sennacherib by fortifying and expanding the city's walls and by building the tunnel that still bears his name to ensure a steady supply of water.** And it was he who instituted a major religious reform in which he sought to centralize worship in Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, eliminating the shrines and sacred pillars in outlying areas of the country, by then divided into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. Indeed, as we shall see, Hezekiah even wanted to reunite the country again, as in the days of David and Solomon.
The inscription on the seal, written in the kind of Hebrew letters used before the Babylonian Exile, reads, according to Cross:
The seal, as impressed in the bulls, is extraordinary not only because it belonged to a well-known Judahite king, but also because it is iconic; that is, in addition to the Hebrew inscription, it shows a picture; in this case a carving of a two-- winged beetle pushing a ball of mud or dung.
What in the world is a two-winged dung beetle doing on a seal of a Hebrew king? Its appearance, especially on a royal seal, begs for interpretation. Cross associates it with Phoenician iconography. The importance of the matter is reflected in the title of his article: "King Hezekiah's Seal Bears Phoenician Imagery."
The question is indeed important, as I shall explain, but I believe Cross gave the wrong answer. The image is a direct borrowing from Egyptian iconography and can be understood as an adaptation by the great Judahite king to advance his own national agenda.
Cross recognizes that the iconography of the dung beetle (also called a scarab) originated in Egypt. But it was appropriated by the Phoenicians, along with much other Egyptian art, as is widely accepted. Thus many Phoenician seals are scarab-shaped and we find many Egyptian motifs, including the dung...