Utrecht University Old Testament scholar Dr Marjo Korpel has discovered that a seal found in 1964 and dating from the 9th century BCE belonged to the biblical figure Queen Jezebel. The seal’s symbols served as the basis for Korpel’s conclusion.
In Israel in 1964, archaeologist Nahman Avigad found a seal engraved with the name yzbl in ancient Hebrew. It was initially assumed that the seal had belonged to Queen Jezebel (Izebel), the Phoenician wife of the Israelite King Ahab (9th century B.C.). However, because the spelling of the name was erroneous and the personal seal could just as easily have belonged to another women of the same name, there was uncertainty regarding the original owner.

A new investigation by the Utrecht Old Testament scholar Marjo Korpel demonstrates that the seal must have belonged to the infamous Queen Jezebel. Korpel reached this conclusion after more careful investigation of the symbols that appear on the seal.

Seal characteristics

The seal not only bears symbols that indicate a woman but also symbols that designate a royal female owner. Furthermore, the seal is exceptionally large compared to the seals commonly possessed by ordinary citizens. With regard to the name, Korpel demonstrates through comparison with similar seals that the upper edge of the seal must have carried two broken-off letters that point to Jezebel as owner and lead to a correct spelling of Jezebel’s name (in mirror image).

The seal is included in the ‘Israel Antiquities Authority Collection’ of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, which thus vouches for the authenticity of the object.

Queen Jezebel

Jezebel was the Phoenician (and therefore foreign, and according to the Bible also pagan) wife of the Israelite King Ahab (9th century BCE). The Bible portrays Queen Jezebel as a woman who, in the background, exerted enormous influence, including on her husband (1 Kings 21:25). She sees the opportunity to bend the country’s affairs to her will by devious means, including using her husband’s seal (1 Kings 21:8) to forge letters.

Nonetheless, she now appears to have possessed her own seal, which enabled her to deal with matters independently of Ahab. Eventually, Jezebel came to a bad end. The prophets of Israel accused her of prostitution, murder, idolatry and sorcery. She is made to suffer a horrific death.

The results were published in the Journal for Semitics.

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(Nov. 25, 2007) — Chemists from the University of Delaware, in collaboration with a colleague at the University of Wisconsin, have set a new world record for the shortest chemical bond ever recorded between two metals, in this case, two atoms of chromium.
The distance? A minuscule 1.803 Ångstroms, which is on the order of a billionth of the thickness of a human hair.

The chemists weren’t driven by the Guinness Book of World Records or even a friendly bet. As is often the case in science, they discovered the molecule, which has a quintuple (i. e., five-fold) bond, quite by accident.

“Sometimes things like this just happen,” said Klaus Theopold, professor and chairperson of the UD Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Theopold and Kevin Kreisel, who graduated with his doctorate from UD in August and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin, made the finding, working with research associate Glenn Yap and postdoctoral fellow Olga Dmitrenko, both from UD, and Clark Landis, a colleague from the University of Wisconsin.

Theopold has been researching the chemistry of chromium for a long time. The metal is an important industrial catalyst for making plastics such as polyethylene.

“We discovered this interesting looking molecule and realized that it had an extremely short distance between the metal atoms,” Theopold said.

A rule-of-thumb in chemistry, Theopold said, is that bond length and bond strength go together, so it’s likely that the metal-metal bond is a strong one, although Theopold said no one knows for sure.

“This molecule is probably not practically useful. We’re not going to get a patent here or cure cancer,” Theopold noted. “Records define the range in which things can exist. It’s just an interesting molecule from a fundamental scientific standpoint.”

And those teeny-tiny bonds do mark a new world record for chemistry.

Before the UD discovery, Theopold said, the last record, achieved by researchers at Texas A&M University, stood for nearly 30 years.

The research was reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

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(Nov. 26, 2007) — A team of researchers, led by the University of Sheffield and Queen Mary, University of London, has discovered how plants protect their leaves from damage by sunlight when they are faced with extreme climates. The new findings, which have been published in Nature, could have implications both for adapting plants to the threat of global warming and for helping man better harness solar energy.
Photosynthesis in plants relies upon the efficient collection of sunlight. This process can work even at low levels of sunlight, when plants are in the shade or under cloud cover for example. However, when the sun is very bright or when it is cold or very dry, the level of light energy absorbed by leaves can be greatly in excess of that which can be used in photosynthesis and can destroy the plant. However, plants employ a remarkable process called photoprotection, in which a change takes place in the leaves so that the excess light energy is converted into heat, which is harmlessly dispersed.

Until now, researchers hadn’t known exactly how photoprotection works. By joining forces with their physicist colleagues in France and the Netherlands, the UK team have determined how this process works. They were able to show how a small number of certain key molecules, hidden among the millions of others in the plant leaf, change their shape when the amount of light absorbed is excessive; and they have been able to track the conversion of light energy to heat that occurs in less than a billionth of a second.

Many plant species can successfully inhabit extreme environments where there is little water, strong sunlight, low fertility and extremes of temperature by having highly tuned defence mechanisms, including photoprotection. However, these mechanisms are frequently poorly developed in crop plants since they are adapted for high growth and productivity in an environment manipulated by irrigation, fertilisation, enclosure in greenhouses and artificial shading. These manipulations are not sustainable, they have high energy costs and may not be adaptable to an increasingly unstable climate. Researchers believe that in the future, the production of both food and biofuel from plants needs to rely more on their natural defence mechanisms, including photoprotection.

Professor Horton, of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, who lead the UK team, said: “These results are important in developing plants with improved photoprotective mechanisms to enable them to better cope with climate change. This may be hugely significant in our fight against global warming. It is a fantastic example of what can be achieved in science when the skills of biologists and physicists are brought together.”

Moreover, there are other global implications of this research. Dr Alexander Ruban of Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, comments: “As we seek to develop new solar energy technology it will be important to not only understand, but to mimic the way biology has learnt to optimise light collection in the face of the continually changing intensity of sunlight.”

The paper, Identification of a mechanism of photoprotective energy dissipation in higher plants, will be published in Nature on 22 November 2007.

The research project is a collaboration between the University of Sheffield, UK; Queen Mary, University of London, UK; the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands; the University of Wageningen, Netherlands; CEA Saclay and CNRS Gif-sur-Yvette, France.

The work was supported by grants from UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research via the Foundation of Earth and Life Sciences, Laserlab Europe; ANR, and the Marie Curie Research Training Network.

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