LMLK Jar Seals

LMLK Jar Seals are the stamp impressions found on the handles of a royal Judahite storage jar, pressed into the clay before the jar was fired. The stamps usually bear the word LMLK in Hebrew script together with one of four names, Hebron, Ziph, Socoh and MMST; the first three are places in Judah. Dvira gives the meaning of LMLK as "for or belonging to the king". Over 2,000 stamped handles have been found, nearly all of them within the territory of the kingdom of Judah.

---

The Stamps and the Jars

Dvira describes two kinds of emblem on the stamps, a four-winged scarab and a two-winged round symbol, which is usually taken to be a rolled-up scroll or the sun disc. Hebron, Ziph and Socoh are all named among the cities Rehoboam built up for the defense of Judah (2 Chronicles 11:5-10). Dvira notes that the identification of the fourth place is still debated, though it was likely near Jerusalem. The vessel that carried the stamps is the oval storage jar, also called the lmlk or Royal Judahite Storage Jar. Sergi, Karasik, Gadot and Lipschits find that this jar form first appeared as a local type confined to the Shephelah, without any particular political or ethnic tie.

---

Dating

Many stamped jars come from Level III at Lachish, where some were found sealed beneath the destruction of that level. Sennacherib's forces destroyed that level in 701 BC. The biblical account records that Sennacherib king of Assyria captured all the fortified cities of Judah in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah's reign, and sent his officers with a great army from Lachish to Jerusalem (2 Kings 18:13, 17). David Ussishkin's 1977 study, "The Destruction of Lachish by Sennacherib and the Dating of the Royal Judean Storage Jars", tied the dating of the jars to that destruction. The dating of the stamped jars is now debated. Lipschits writes that a scholarly consensus of some thirty years associated all the lmlk jars with the Lachish Level III destruction, and that Ussishkin has argued again that all the stamped jars were made together in a short period just before 701 BC. Dvira likewise holds that the destruction of Level III by Sennacherib's forces in 701 BC allows all such impressions to be dated to the days of Hezekiah. Lipschits, Sergi and Koch argue instead that the stamp system began in the last quarter of the eighth century BC, while Judah was a vassal of Assyria, and that it continued and developed after Sennacherib's campaign of 701 BC. In Lipschits's reply to Ussishkin, the two-winged Type IIa impressions are among those found sealed under the Lachish III destruction, while some impressions appear only at hill-country sites that escaped destruction in 701 BC or in levels assigned to the seventh century. The Temple Mount Sifting Project notes that many hill-country cities were not destroyed and that the jars were put back into use there.

---

Purpose

The Ramat Rahel Project of Tel Aviv University and Heidelberg calls the exact function of the four named centres "highly disputed", and judges that they must have served the Judahite monarchy, perhaps for tax collection and storage. Dvira describes a system in which produce from the whole kingdom was gathered at four central sites, most likely by the state, as a means of taxation.