More on that bulla of Jeroboam II. Fake or real?

NORTHWEST SEMITIC EPIGRAPHY? 'Fake' Seal Impression of Biblical King Jeroboam Is Authentic, New Study Says. 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 (Ariel David, Haaretz).

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).

I noted the first announcement (before any of the journal articles) in 2020 here.

This time I'm going to inject some skepticism.

Do you remember the Darius ostracon? The exciting artfact found on the surface at Lachish that referred to King Darius I and even included a date? It wasn't long ago. It seemed too good to be true, but ...

But a few weeks later, after the IAA had put the potsherd through multiple scans and laboratory tests, including at the Dead Sea Scrolls Lab, Ganor called Levy and told him the potsherd was believed to be authentic.

Guess what? It was too good to be true. It was a modern showpiece for use in teaching that someone had carelessly dropped at the site after a demonstration to students.

If an object passes all the tests, that just tells us that it has not been demonstrated (yet) to be a fake. It does not prove it is genuine. The authors of the new study acknowledge this.

In the last link above, I commented:

What are all those scans and laboratory tests worth if they can't even identify a modern pedagogical showpiece that wasn't intended to fool anyone? This is a major hit to their credibility.

Let's not forget that now. The tests got fooled bigtime earlier this year.

Am I indulging in hyperskepticisim? Maybe. But keep reading.

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.

There are ways of getting around this problem, but it is a substantial piece of evidence that the bulla (seal impression) is a fake or forgery.

Where do we stand then?

I accept the bulla as provisionally genuine. It is not nothing to have passed all those tests, some of which, as article notes, had not been devised at the time it was bought. At the same time, fakes can sometimes pass the tests. And there is good evidence on other grounds that the object is a fake.

So, I have my doubts, but provisionally genuine. But no historical reconstructions should use it for evidence without flagging the problems with it. Any historical reconstruction using it is on shakey ground. That is true in general for the use of unprovenanced artifacts.

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