Scale Weight of High Priest

The Tower is reporting that archaeologists have found scale weights belonging to the High Priest who served in the temple in Jerusalem before it was destroyed by the Romans. Below is an excerpt from the article:

A 2,000-year-old scale weight belonging to the family of the Jewish high priest has been discovered by an archaeologist in Jerusalem, Ynet reported Tuesday.

The artifact was located underneath the Tiferet Israel synagogue, which was built in the 18th century and destroyed by Jordan in 1948. Excavations under the synagogue have led to discoveries of artifacts from the Ottoman, Mamluk, and Byzantine periods, as well as from the eras of the two Jewish temples.

Hebrew University archaeologist Oren Gutfield discovered the weight and other artifacts from the Second Temple era about three feet underneath the building’s floor. “It doesn’t happen very much that I get emotional when I find artifacts. But here, I went pale and even felt a small tremble to see the name of the high priest,” Gutfield recounted.

There were two lines of writing on the weight, with the image of a lyre between them. At first the text was obscured by a layer of fire damage, possibly from the burning of Jerusalem in 70 CE. But after further cleaning, the family name of the high priest was readable on the second line. (The first line of writing has not yet been translated.)

Read the article in its entirety by visiting The Tower.

NOTE: For other articles on archaeology, archaeological discoveries, and how they relate to the Bible, read my post Can Archaeology Prove the Bible?.

Claude Mariottini
Emeritus Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

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