a seal or signet: the small engraved stone or ring, worn on the body, that a person pressed onto documents and goods to mark them as his own.
In the world of the Bible a seal was a small, hard stone, pierced and hung on a cord at the neck, or set into a ring worn on the right hand. Its face was engraved with the owner's name or emblem, and when pressed into a lump of soft clay it left a mark no one else could copy. Because it was carried always on the body and was unmistakably one person's, the seal effectively was that person. To hand someone your seal was to hand over your identity, and to seal a letter or a jar was to put your own authority on it.
That one object stretches across the word's uses. At its plainest it is the seal a person owns and presses into service: Judah leaves his as a pledge, and a royal seal makes letters binding. From there the word becomes a rich picture. To be set "as a seal" on another's heart, or to be made God's "signet," is to be held close, marked as belonging, and never let go. Two of the craftsman's chapters borrow the word differently, to describe fine engraving done "like the engravings of a seal." And in the book of Job the seal stands for what it does to soft material: pressing a shape into it, or shutting it inviolably tight.
The word reaches its high point in a matched pair of oracles. In one, a doomed king is told that even if he were the signet on God's own right hand, God would tear him off. A generation later the image is turned around: a new leader is promised, "I will make you like a signet, for I have chosen you." The same small object that pictures rejection in the one passage pictures God's choosing in the other.
Nuances
Whether the traditional Hebrew reading (the earth shaped like clay under a seal) or Marvin Pope's proposed emendation (the earth colored like a dyed garment) is original at Job 38:14.
- majorityRetain the traditional Hebrew text: at dawn the earth's features rise into relief like clay taking the shape of a pressed seal.; David J. A. Clines, Job 38-42, Word Biblical Commentary 18B (2011); Norman C. Habel, The Book of Job, Old Testament Library (1985); Samuel E. Balentine, Job, Smyth & Helwys (2006)
- minorityEmend one word so the line reads that the earth is dyed like a garment in the colors of dawn, removing the seal-image.; Marvin H. Pope, Job, Anchor Bible 15 (1965)