BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Rings Before Marriage in Hellenistic Jerusalem?

Children’s rings may have been buried in marriage rite

Gold rings, a gold animal earring, and a gold bead from Building 110. Photo by D. Gazit, CC-BY 4.0.

A recent ‘Atiqot article draws attention to a small number of remarkable finds from Hellenistic Jerusalem: four gold ornaments and three bronze earrings recovered from Building 110 in the Givati Parking Lot excavations. Dating to the late third and early second centuries BCE, these objects show some aspect of domestic life in Jerusalem during a period of increased interaction with the wider Hellenistic world.

The jewelry reflects the wealth and craftsmanship of the period. The assemblage includes gold rings set with deep-red gemstones (probably garnets), a gold earring decorated with delicate filigree and an animal-head motif, a hollow gold bead, and simple bronze earrings. Comparable ornaments are known from Egypt, the Aegean, the Levant, and elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean.

The jewelry was found during the excavation of Building 110, a large, ashlar-built courtyard complex with substantial plaster floors and other features suggesting an elite residential setting. A gold ring and three bronze earrings were found within one of the plaster floors. A gold bead was discovered in construction fill beneath another floor. Other gold objects were found in fills closely associated with the building. Most of the ornaments were intact, with little evidence of wear, breakage, or abrasion. Given the value of gold, the authors argue that accidental loss or ordinary discard is unlikely.

The fact that the ornaments were deposited in different parts of the building, rather than together as a single cache, suggests to the authors that they represent several episodes of intentional placement. Individual objects seem to have been deliberately placed in specific locations, perhaps during different stages of the building’s use.

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The two gold rings are very small, measuring roughly half an inch in diameter. The authors compare them with rings from Hellenistic children’s burials and argue that they were probably for children. Drawing on broader evidence showing that jewelry was especially associated with women and girls in the Greek and Hellenistic Mediterranean, they suggest the rings most likely belonged to young girls.

When theorizing what the deposits may have meant, the scholars cite a Hellenistic Greek practice of jewelry (among other items) being offered at sanctuaries and temples. Votive dedications are particularly well attested at sanctuaries of Hera, Aphrodite, and Artemis. Inventory lists were kept at the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron that recorded jewelry and garments associated with young women. Likewise in the Delian inventories, jewelry constitutes a major category of offering.

Ancient literature often connects personal offerings like jewelry with female life-stage transitions. An epigram in the Anthologia Palatina (6.280), for example, describes a girl named Timareta dedicating her childhood toys and a lock of hair to Artemis in connection with her transition out of childhood and toward marriage. Another epigram (Anthologia Palatine 6.207) describes five young women from Naucratis dedicating personal belongings and jewelry to Aphrodite in connection with marriage.[i]

The researchers propose that the Jerusalem jewelry may belong to this broader votive tradition. If the authors are right that Building 110’s jewelry was connected with transitional moments of young girls’ lives, in Jerusalem, the practice seems to have been adapted to take place within domestic settings rather than in temples or sanctuaries.

[i] It should be noted, however, that these texts reflect their particular Hellenistic context rather than universal or timeless understandings of such major life transitions.

Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.

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