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Jaazaniah (Hebrew: יַאֲזַנְיָה Ya’azaniah, lit. “May God hear”) or Jezaniah is a biblical Hebrew personal name that appears in the Bible for several different individuals, and has been found on an onyx seal dating from the 6th century BCE.
Onyx seal
The name Jaazaniah appears on a sixth-century BC onyx seal discovered during the excavation of the Tell en-Nasbeh site, likely the biblical city of Mizpah in Benjamin, near Jerusalem, conducted between 1926 and 1935 by William Frederic Badè of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA. The seal was found in Stratum 3 of the tell, dating it to the period from shortly after 586 BCE until about 400 BCE (Iron Age II period). The epigraphy of the seal is consistent with dating it to the time of Gedaliah.
The seal carries the inscription “(belonging) to Jaazaniah the servant of the king.” The seal may have belonged to an officer named Jaazaniah who, according to II Kings 25:23 and Jeremiah 40:8, came to the Babylonian-appointed ruler Gedaliah at Mizpah after the fall of Jerusalem.
At the bottom of the seal is the image of a fighting cock, one of the earliest representations of this bird ever recovered, and certainly the first known representation of the chicken in ancient Israel. This depiction is consistent with the remains of these birds found at other Israelite Iron Age sites, when the rooster was used as a fighting bird. They are also pictured on other seals from the period as a symbol of ferocity, such as on the one engraved on a late seventh-century BCE red jasper seal inscribed “Jehoahaz, son of the king.”