Imagine in your minds eye you are back in time during age of Israelites. Now imagine yourself walking the halls of palace. As you walk you see what seems to be a small fortune of art decorating the halls. You eventually stop walk and you find yourself in the throne room and right before you see a chair but, not just not any chair the most elegant chair you have ever see with your own two eyes. This chair glistens with jewels and some sort of white material you are not familiar with. The white material seems almost alien in nature and yet it is beautiful and makes the thrones seem as if from another world. That white on that throne would be ivory. Ivory items are peculiar items when one thinks about them for long enough. One starts to think what are they, where did they come from, how where they made and who made them, what were they were used for, what is their meaning, and what do the motifs on them stand for. To be honest there is no one answer for each of these questions but, there are several good theories out there. But I am not going to talk about all ivories that have ever existed I am going talk to you the reader about Israelite Ivories that existed during the late bronze age to the late Iron age.
To begin to answer the questions I have purposed and kind of made you think of I will start by answering the most basic of them all. What are Ivory artifacts? Ivory artifacts are any item made of the tusks of elephants, teeth of hippos, or the tusks of walruses. But today I am only discussing the early Israelites and their ivories. Their ivories mostly consisted of elephant tusks. The reason that we can assume that the tusks of elephant were used for art and not the ivory of other spices such as hippos is that it is stated in ...
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http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/hermitageivory.html
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Pritchard, J.B (1962) Ivory. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (Vol. 2 pp. 773-775) New York City, New York: Abingo press
Ivory. (1946 & 1952). Hastings, James and Rowley H. H. Dictionary of the Bible (pp450), New York City, New York: Charles Scrubner’s Sons.
Suter, C. (2005). Crafts and images in contact. Fruibourg : Academic Pess Fribourg.
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