Story

Bullae of Jerusalem

c. 600 BCE

Biblical Narrative

The Book of Jeremiah names dozens of officials of the late Judahite court — princes, scribes, priests, military officers — many of them in passing, in the middle of an oracle or a court scene that is over in a verse. The reader rarely pauses on these names; they are the political furniture of a doomed administration, the men who summoned and silenced and finally arrested the prophet, who debated whether to listen to him or to throw him into a cistern, who carried scrolls between the king's apartments and the palace courtyard. They are background figures in a foreground story.

But because the prophet's narratives are extremely circumstantial — full of titles, patronymics, and locations — they describe a real and identifiable bureaucratic class. Jeremiah does not say ״a scribe came to me״; he says ״Gemariah son of Shaphan the scribe, in his chamber in the upper court, at the entry of the new gate of the Lord's house.״ Such precision invites a particular kind of test: are these men real? Did the kingdom's last bureaucracy leave traces — its seal-impressions, its archived dockets, its administrative paperwork — under the rubble of 586 BCE?

The Hebrew Bible contains in fact what amounts to a partial roster of Jeremiah's contemporaries. Shaphan the scribe and his sons Ahikam, Gemariah, and Elasah, his grandson Gedaliah (the last governor of Judah), and Gedaliah's son Micaiah; the priest Pashhur son of Immer; the royal officials Jehucal son of Shelemiah and Pashhur son of Malchiah, who came to demand Jeremiah's death; the eunuch Ebed-melech the Cushite, who pulled Jeremiah out of the cistern; the scribe Baruch son of Neriah, who took down Jeremiah's dictation, and Baruch's brother Seraiah, who carried a scroll to Babylon. Each is named by patronymic. Each, in the political world of late-7th-century Jerusalem, would have owned a personal seal.

What makes the Bullae of Jerusalem extraordinary is that the floors of those officials' offices have, in part, been excavated — and on those floors lay their seals' impressions. Not all of Jeremiah's names have been matched, but several have, with epigraphic precision: Gemariah son of Shaphan, the scribe in whose chamber Jeremiah's scroll was first read aloud (Jeremiah 36:10); Jehucal son of Shelemiah, who came to demand the prophet's death (Jeremiah 38:1); Pashhur son of Immer, the priestly opponent who put Jeremiah in the stocks (Jeremiah 20:1). The names step out of the scroll and into the dirt.

Then read Baruch in the book the words of Jeremiah in the house of the Lord, in the chamber of Gemariah the son of Shaphan the scribe, in the higher court, at the entry of the new gate of the Lord's house, in the ears of all the people.Jeremiah 36:10

Archaeology · History · Genetics

A bulla (plural bullae) is a small lump of clay impressed with the seal of a sender and applied to the binding of a rolled papyrus document, where it served simultaneously as a tamper-evident closure and as the sender's signature. When the document was opened, the bulla was broken off and discarded; when the document was archived, the bulla often remained attached to the rolled and tied papyrus until the papyrus disintegrated. In the destruction layers of Iron Age sites — the Babylonian conflagration of 586 BCE in particular — papyrus burns away cleanly while the heat of the fire bakes the clay bulla into permanent terracotta, preserving the seal impression with crystalline clarity. Bullae are, paradoxically, a benefit of the catastrophe.

The first major Iron Age bullae cache from Jerusalem — fifty-one bullae preserving the impressions of forty-five different seals — was excavated by Yigal Shiloh in 1982 in Area G on the eastern slope of the City of David, in the destruction debris of what came to be called the House of the Bullae, an administrative archive room burned in 586 BCE. The cache was published in full by Yair Shoham in volume 6 of the City of David final-report series (Qedem 41, 2000). The forty-five seals belong to forty-three named individuals plus two iconic-only seals; many of the names compound with YHWH (Yahu-) and one — Gemariah son of Shaphan — corresponds exactly to a named figure in the Book of Jeremiah.

Subsequent excavation seasons in the City of David, particularly the renewed excavations led by Eilat Mazar in the early 21st century, have produced two additional bullae bearing names known from Jeremiah. In 2005, Mazar's team published a bulla reading ״Belonging to Jehucal son of Shelemiah son of Shovi,״ found in stratified Iron II destruction debris on the eastern slope. Jehucal son of Shelemiah is named twice in Jeremiah (37:3 and 38:1) as an officer of King Zedekiah who first asked the prophet for intercession and later demanded his execution. In 2008 the same project published a second bulla, ״Belonging to Gedaliah son of Pashhur,״ with the same find context; Gedaliah son of Pashhur is named in Jeremiah 38:1 as one of the officials who joined Jehucal in demanding the prophet's death.

The standard reference work for the larger field is Nahman Avigad and Benjamin Sass, Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals (Israel Academy of Sciences, 1997). Avigad's earlier Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Jeremiah (Israel Exploration Society, 1986) treats a separate, unprovenanced market-purchased hoard of 255 bullae that surfaced in the antiquities market in 1975, including one that reads ״Belonging to Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe״ — an exact match for Baruch son of Neriah, Jeremiah's amanuensis. The unprovenanced status of that hoard, however, has limited its evidentiary weight; the excavated Shiloh and Mazar bullae are accepted by the field as secure.

The Bullae from the City of David provide a contemporaneous administrative window onto the bureaucratic world that the prophet Jeremiah inhabited and quarreled with. They are the closest thing we have to a personnel file for the last ministry of the kingdom of Judah.Eilat Mazar, ״The Wall that Nehemiah Built״ (BAR 2009)