Editor’s Postscript

After the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz got wind that BAR would be publishing the foregoing article, it published its own story in October 2007 about the Jezebel seal and Professor Korpel’s attribution to Queen Jezebel. Korpel’s article, the newspaper wrote, is “scheduled to appear in the highly-respected Biblical Archaeology Review.”

Christopher A. Rollston, a professor at Emmanuel School of Religion and a budding paleographer, quickly filed a response on the Internet to Korpel’s piece.¹ Rollston could find Korpel’s argument in a scholarly paper she had published in the Journal for Semitics.² Rollston concluded that the seal could not be that of Queen Jezebel. Korpel, in turn, will be publishing a scholarly article in the journal Ugarit-Forschungen that addresses Rollston’s arguments, most of which are technical and easily answered— except one. And that one relates to paleography, Rollston’s specialty.

Rollston studied the four letters on the seal and concluded that they cannot date to the ninth century B.C.E., when Queen Jezebel lived. They must date later. Therefore, even if the name on the seal is Jezebel, it cannot refer to Queen Jezebel, wife of King Ahab of Israel. Here are Rollston’s own words: