Cargill Syndrome Infects Tel Aviv Scholar

"These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also!" (Acts 17:6).


As noted in comments by the ever-alert pithom to my previous Wordpress post, the excavators at Azekah/Zakariya found a handle this past week, & Omer Sergi positively identified it as an M4x. Fortunately Robert Cargill (of upside-down Talpiot-ossuary-image fame) made a video recording, which was shared on YouTube, & linked on Tel Azekah's official Facebook & Wordpress sites with these respective descriptions:


"Here's a video Bob Cargill took today, Aug 2, 2012 at Tel Azekah of (very-soon-to-be Dr. -- c'mon Oded, read that dissertation!) Omer Sergei, Supervisor of Tel Azekah Area S-2. Chaim pulled a LMLK jar handle out of the ground, and Omer sight read it and then gave an impromptu lecture to the student volunteers on LMLK seals."


"On our Facebook and Youtube sites you can see a great video Bob Cargill filmed when a lemelekh MMST jar handle came out of a wall and Omer Sergey took the time to explain it."


Yesterday I commemorated the video as an official LMLK Milestone on the LRW. Here's a complete transcript [with bracketed comments by me]:


Text: "Omer Sergi (Tel Aviv Univ.) gives an impromptu lecture on LMLK seals after discovering and sight reading one at Tel Azekah"


[At the end of the video, credit goes to a man named Chaim for discovering it, but Sergi deserves all the credit for the erroneous sight reading.]


Omer Sergi [OS]: "This is, this is a stamp impression, & you can see..."


Unidentified woman [UW]: "Oh! Look! Yeah!"


OS: "...its 2 arms, & 2 more here. This is a scarab. This is... We call it 4-winged LMLK stamp impression..."


UW: "That's a nice impression!"


OS: "...& I can see here the letter Tav, you know ancient Hebrew, & Shin, which means that the name of the place name below the LMLK was Momshot."


Robert Cargill [RC]: "Momsheet? Momshot?"


OS: "Momshit, yeah. The Tav is clear."


[Having blown the orientation & reading of the inscription, he raises the handle to his mouth & literally blows on it!]


Unidentified man [UM]: "What does that mean, the name?"


OS: "The name was... The LMLK stamp... Okay, you know nothing about LMLK stamp impressions, huh?"


[The ideal audience for a university professor to indoctrinate.]


OS: "LMLK stamp impressions mark the, LMLK in Hebrew means 'Belonging to the king'."


UM: "Oh, okay."


OS: "Okay, & it marks commodities, & the culture of commodities that were produced in the royal estates of the king. Each LMLK stamp impression has a symbol, which is polytheistic symbol by the way."


[Not necessarily true, & should not be taught as an objective fact but as a subjective interpretation!]


OS: "It's all a double-winged sun-disk, which is a symbol of gods in many, many ancient Near Eastern cultures, or the scarab. These, these are the symbol. Above the symbol you always have the 'Belonging to the king' LMLK..."


[Except when you don't!]


OS: "Here you can clearly see the Lamed & the Kaf; the Mems, I don't see them..."


[Note that there's only 1 Mem in LMLK, but that's a forgivable offense, especially if English is not your primary language, or you're thinking of 2 Lameds. Here he's pointing to the top-right register, which when oriented correctly would be the lower-left register, which in this instance contains traces of the Kaf & Hey of SUKE. Had he oriented it correctly, he would easily have seen the Mem & 2 Lameds.]


OS: "La-, yeah, Lamed & Kaf are clear above. You can look at it later; I can show you the letters. And below there was the name of the royal estate."


[Except for the fact that it doesn't actually say "Royal Estate"; it just has the word that some scholars subjectively interpret as the name of a royal estate.]


OS: "We have 4--Hebron, Momshit, Sokho, & Zif. Sokho is Sochoh here."


[While other scholars believe it's the Socho southwest of Hebron, but go ahead, continue presenting your subjective opinion as if it's a scientific fact since that's the norm for university professors.]


OS: "So the jars were, we know that, that the jars were..."


[He stuttered due to my Ninja time-traveling thought waves signaling that I was going to challenge him on the S-word location issue!]


OS: "...made in 1 workshop, that probably was a royal workshop, & the officials of the Judahite kings, the kings of the House of David..."


[Whoa!!! Wait a minute!!! Did he just acknowledge the existence of the HOD?!?! No, he probably meant to say "the kings of the mythological House of David."]


OS: "...came to this workshop, each LMLK jar was made, & then it was stamped. Now according to the stamp..."


[Mind you, it was according to the stamp; not according to the objective scholar's subjective interpretation of the meaning of the stamp, but according to the stamp itself!]


OS: "...it was sent to the royal estate. In the royal estate it was filled with royal agriculture, with probably wine or oil, but I guess wine; & from the royal estate it was distributed to the cities of Judah. Okay?"


[Why would a king send produce from his estates to cities all over his kingdom in marked jars, when many more unmarked jars were sent there too? Beware whenever you hear or read a scholar attempting to explain LMLK seals without attempting to explain Type 484 jars in general.]


OS: "Umm, so this is kind of administrative economic system that was used in the kingdom of Judah, the LMLK system from last 3rd of the 8th century..."


[Fairytale warning!]


OS: "...when Judah became subjugated to the Assyrian empire. This is when this system began to operate..."


[Fairytale complete; continue reading & you'll see he does not acknowledge that this time spanned the Bible & Assyrian sources recording King Hezekiah rebelling against Assyria; otherwise Sergi would have to account for a Judean king sending Assyrian provisions all over Judah. Is there a record of Sennacherib sparing the Assyrians living in all the Judean cities he conquered?]


OS: "...& LMLK continued at least probably till the 2nd, the, somewhere in the first half of the 7th century, & then it was replaced in another system of stamp impressions, but the sys-, the economic system stayed the same; the stamp impression was changed. Okay?"


[The system of the Judean king sending stamped & unstamped empty jars to royal estates for filling, then sending the stamped & unstamped filled jars throughout the kingdom?!?! Uh, no, that's not okay because it doesn't make any sense, nor does it account for Hezekiah's rebellion or Manasseh's policy change, or the 484-483 pottery-style change.]


RC: "Can I get a..."


UM: "Nice video!"


RC: "Yeah, it was good. See if we can get it to do a close-up here."


[As he continues holding it in the same upside-down position as Sergi.]


OS: "Anyway, Chaim gets..."


RC: "Hold that, hold that right there. Just hold it right there for a second."


[...in the misleading, upside-down position from which Dr. Cargill is most comfortable working!]


UM: "Very nice job!"


OS: "Nice job, Chaim! I think he's the man of the day now."


In response, pithom (using the name againstjebelallawz) posted this comment on the YouTube page:


"A four-winged MMST? These are pretty rare! A clear photograph is a necessity (to determine whether the seal used to stamp the jar was of Grena's Cursory or Lapidarist phase)."


Then I posted this comment (when the video had only 20 views total):


"I can't say with absolute certainty, but based on the upside-down orientation shown in the final few seconds of the video, I think it comes from the 'Absalom's Tomb' phase."


In response, againstjebelallawz wrote:


"Is that a reference to the Tabor 'fish' fiasco earlier this year?"


After returning home later in the day I continued (not responding to his fish remark since it was obviously rhetorical):


"Most likely a shifted S4L. In all fairness to Dr. Cargill, Omer Sergi was holding it upside-down, & at 0:27 pointed to the '[MM]ST' in the bottom-left register, which would actually be the 'LM' register (top-right in proper orientation). Notice that at 0:38 he emphasizes that 'the Tav is clear.' This is why seasoned scholars like to take time to study objects in detail prior to formal publication. Nonetheless, I'm grateful to Cargill for sharing this first-ever LMLK-excavation video."


If the video is still online, you'll see that they (Sergi &/or Cargill) decided that it's better for the world if these comments didn't exist, so they deleted them.


This is a great example of the state-of-mind of some university-level scholars: Rather than admitting a simple mistake, rather than allowing someone else to present an alternate interpretation, it's better to censor others, & present yourself as the all-knowing, all-powerful Oz (hiding behind a curtain of insecurity).


What makes this a particularly egregious intellectual offense is that these are the same people who accuse the Bible writers of inventing/presenting false history.


Same thing happened over at The Bible & Interpretation this past week. But I'd prefer to cover that in detail in a separate post.


G.M. Grena