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A Further Correction in the Reading of the Petra Temple
InscriptionAuthor(s): Joseph NavehSource: Bulletin of the American
Schools of Oriental Research, No. 280 (Nov., 1990), p. 89Published
by: The American Schools of Oriental ResearchStable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1357313Accessed: 11/11/2010 04:49
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7/27/2019 A Further Correction in the Reading of the Petra
Temple Inscription
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S h o r t N o t e s
A Further Correction in the Reading of the Petra Temple
Inscription
scription (Hammond, Johnson and Jones1986: 78) misread the text
in line 2:
cm klt kryz Cwnqdm dnhon the condition that a proclamation of
delin-quency be completed before his (time)
Jones (1989: 42-45) offers a new reading:
cm klt' kryz hww qdm dnh... with the foods are assigned in the
presence ofthis one (masc.)
This is, however, only a partial correction. It isquite obvious
that instead of kryz hww qdm dnhone should read
kdy hww qdm dnhas they were before
The photograph reproduced in the editio princepsclearly
demonstrates that there is no zayin. The barinterpreted by Jones as
a zayin is in fact the leftstroke of the he. What Jones saw as the
left strokeof the he belongs to the long downstroke of thefinal nun
(of the word qrbwn) descending fromline 1.
JOSEPH AVEHDepartment of Ancient
Semitic LanguagesThe Hebrew UniversityJerusalem 91905,
Israel
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hammond, P. C.; Johnson, D. J.; and Jones, R. N.1986 A
Religio-Legal Inscription rom the Atar-
gatis/Al-'Uzza Temple at Petra. Bulletin ofthe American Schools
of Oriental Research263: 77-80.
Jones, R. N.1989 A New Reading of the Petra Temple Inscrip-
tion. Bulletin of the American Schools of Ori-ental Research 75:
41-46.
The Bethel Inscribed Stamp Again:
A Vindication of Mrs. Theodore Bent
he reader of this journal is well acquaintedwith the problem of
the Bethel inscribedstamp as almost all information on the sub-
ject was published in the Bulletin.The Bethel inscribed stamp
was unearthed in
1957 by James L. Kelso at Tel Beitin and publishedby Van Beek
and Jamme (1958). My discovery, inJuly 1960, of a Glaser squeeze, A
727, showing thesame
inscriptionbut made from a
stampthe
photoof which had been published by Mr. and Mrs.Theodore Bent
(1900: pl. facing p. 436) was re-
leased without delay by Jamme and Van Beek(1961). We are of the
opinion that the two seals areidentical, yet distinct. Several
years later, Yadin(1969; 1971) broke the preceding possessio
pacata;he contended that the two stamps in fact "are butone and the
same" (1969: 40). However, he couldnot explain the most crucial
question created byhis thesis: how could a stamp seen at al-Ma'had
in
W~adiawc~n
(WsdIi Hadramawt) byMr. and Mrs.
Bent at the end of the last century be unearthedin 1957 190 cm
below ground level at Beitin, about
89
