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The seal of Shema was unearthed during Gottlieb Schumacher's German Society for Oriental Research excavations at Megiddo (Tell el-Mutesellim) in 1904, discovered in debris associated with the Iron Age stratum. Following Ottoman-era conventions governing excavation finds, the original jasper seal passed into the collection of the Imperial Ottoman Museum in Constantinople, now the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. A cast or impression has long been held at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, facilitating continued scholarly access. The artifact is a green jasper stamp seal of exceptional craftsmanship, measuring approximately 3.8 centimeters in length. Its face bears a finely incised roaring lion rendered in profile—an iconographic motif widely associated with royal power and strength in ancient Near Eastern glyptic art. Flanking the lion in paleo-Hebrew script is the two-line inscription: "Belonging to Shema, servant of Jeroboam" (lšmʿ ʿbd yrbʿm). The term ʿeved, often translated "servant," functioned in Israelite administrative contexts as "official" or "minister," denoting high royal stewardship rather than servitude. The Jeroboam named is almost universally identified by scholars with Jeroboam II, who reigned over the northern kingdom of Israel circa 786–746 BC and whose reign is described in 2 Kings 14:23–29. The seal's significance for biblical study is considerable. It constitutes one of the earliest and most securely identified extrabiblical attestations of an Israelite monarch by name on a contemporary artifact. It corroborates the biblical depiction of Jeroboam II's court as administratively sophisticated and economically expansive, a picture reinforced by the prophetic literature of Amos, who addressed Israelite society during precisely this reign (Amos 1:1; 7:10–11). The iconographic use of the lion reflects the same royal symbolism evident across contemporaneous Levantine and Assyrian material culture, contextualizing Israelite administrative practice within its broader ancient Near Eastern setting. **Sources:** Nahman Avigad and Benjamin Sass, *Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals* (Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1997); William G. Dever, *What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?* (Eerdmans, 2001); 2 Kings 14:23–29; Amos 1:1.
The Shema seal provides direct epigraphic attestation of Jeroboam II's administration, anchoring the biblical portrayal of his prosperous northern kingdom in verifiable ninth-to-eighth-century BC material culture and confirming the existence of a high royal official under that monarch.