LMLK

Judah, Israel

I kicked at the dirt again—mostly out of frustration and partly because I was tired of crouching. When we first started out on this hike I had high hopes of finding something memorable, some piece of history lying around waiting to be discovered. After all, this is the holy land. After a few walks through Jerusalem I’d quickly learned that history was literally everywhere. This was going to be my chance to discover history for myself.

I stooped down to grab another handful of earth to sift in my hands—more rocks, a few chips of hardened clay. I tossed them aside; old pottery is fairly abundant in this country. The midday September sun continued beat down on my head and sweat trickled down my back. The odds of me finding anything on this dusty hillside were rapidly falling by the minute.

A few hours later, my excitement over the site we were touring was long gone. It was hot, my legs were heavy, and I still hadn’t found anything cool. By now even I could tell what was clay and what wasn’t upon first glance. I picked up what looked like a large jug handle; handles were supposed to be important right?

“I found a handle!” I handed it over to our resident archaeologist Chris McKinny to examine, hoping for some encouraging feedback.

“Where’s the inscription?” McKinny said.

Inscription?

I kicked at the rocks again, this time completely out of frustration. I spied another large clay lump in the gravel. I turned it over with my foot, not even bothering to pick it up—until I saw something on the other side. I looked closer and there was an impression on the handle with… writing? Clearly etched out of the clay into bottom of the impression were four characters that looked almost like cuneiform.

I ran back to archaeologist with my find. “Hey, I think I found something!”

McKinny examined it for all of two seconds.

“This is a lemelech seal impression,” he said. “It dates to about the seventh century BC—around the time of Hezekiah and Isaiah.” He smiled and shook my hand. “Congratulations.”

I held in my hand a large piece of hardened clay, what used to be a handle of a large storage jar with the Hebrew word lemelech (spelled LMLK in Hebrew), which means “of or belonging to the king”. In this case, the king this jar belonged to was King Hezekiah of Judah, the same king who built the water tunnel in Jerusalem. This seal is not the first of it’s kind; in fact, there have been over 2,000 found in and around Jerusalem. Theories have it that Hezekiah was using these jars to collect and transport supplies in anticipation for the Assyrian siege in of Jerusalem in 701 BC.

I held in my hand 2,700 years of history, a piece of clay commissioned by a king of old, a king who was commended in the scrolls, a king whose legacy has survived the centuries. The few weeks I’d been in this country I’d seen the ruins and remains of ancient civilizations and I’ve retraced and relived history in the places where it happened. But for the first time in my life, I—twenty-one year old kid from California—was holding history.