Hebrew Seals

Abstract

The number of provenanced Iron Age Hebrew seals and seal impressions has seen a dramatic increase during the past decades. Avigad and Sass’s classical Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals, published in 1997, comprised 130 provenanced Iron Age Hebrew seals (including seals known only from impressions). Today, this number has risen to over 300 items, mostly owing to a wealth of new material from recent excavations in Jerusalem. The completion of the Stamp Seals of the Southern Levant (SSSL) project offers an opportunity to look back at the corpus of provenanced Hebrew seals and to reflect on the nature of the material. This article comprises a short introduction to Hebrew glyptics, a survey of the updated corpus, and a new typology of Hebrew seals.