Bethlehem Bulla

Sifted, Not Stratified

The Israel Antiquities Authority announced the bulla on 23 May 2012. It had come out of the sifting of soil removed from the IAA excavation on the eastern slope of the City of David, south of the Gihon Spring, directed by R. Reich and E. Shukron; the sifting operation itself runs in Emek Tzurim National Park. It is about 1.5 centimetres across, and R. Reich, publishing it in the Israel Exploration Journal later that year, measured it at 13 by 14 millimetres. No individual finder is recorded.

That word "sifting" carries the whole first half of this article. The bulla is a loose object recovered from a batch of earth. It has no locus, no floor and no sealed layer, and Reich's own published wording is precise about this: it was found in association with pottery sherds of the eighth to seventh centuries BC — which dates the soil, not the object. What the sifting does give it is provenance in the narrower sense. It came out of a licensed excavation at a known site, so unlike more than twenty comparable fiscal bullae, it is not a piece of the antiquities market. Reich says exactly that is the point of it: almost the whole known corpus of these tax dockets is unprovenanced, and this one and one other are not.

A Shipment to the King

This is not a personal seal. It is a fiscal bulla — an administrative tag sealing goods sent to the crown — and it carries three lines rather than a name and patronymic. The reading published by the excavators is bshbʿt, "in the seventh"; bt lhm, Bethlehem; and lmlk, "for the king," of which only the final letter actually survives and the rest is restored. E. Shukron's reconstruction is that in the seventh year of some king's reign a shipment went from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, in silver or in produce, and that this docket travelled with it.

Which king is not recoverable from the object. Shukron himself named Hezekiah, Manasseh or Josiah and said it is unclear which. G. Barkay has argued that the whole corpus of fiscal bullae belongs to the reign of Manasseh. Either way the object sits in the late eighth or seventh century BC, which puts it in the world of the prophet Micah — the man who said that out of Bethlehem Ephrathah, small among the clans of Judah, would come a ruler in Israel.

The reader who arrives here from Christmas should know what the object is and is not. It is a tax receipt. It says nothing about David, nothing about Micah's prophecy, and nothing about the birth of Christ seven centuries later. What it does is put the town's name in the administrative paperwork of the kingdom of Judah, which is a small and genuine thing.

The Reading Was Challenged, and Two Words Are Restored

Within a day of the announcement, G. Athas of Moore Theological College published a letter-by-letter objection from the published photograph. The fourth letter of the second line looked to him like a he rather than the het that Bethlehem requires; the first letter looked more like a resh than a bet; and the first line's second letter did not look like an ayin. On that reading the bulla would not mention Bethlehem at all.

The next day he reported that S. Ahituv had examined the actual object rather than the photograph and read the first surviving letter of the second line as a yod, giving the fuller spelling byt lhm, with traces of a left vertical stroke on the last letter making it a het. Athas said he was more than happy to retract his preliminary conclusion — while adding that he would like one or two further epigraphers to inspect the bulla itself, and making the wider point that an epigraphic announcement ought to carry two independent readings from the start. No further published examination has been traced. So the accurate description is that the reading was challenged from a photograph and confirmed on direct inspection by a specialist, and that the challenge was withdrawn conditionally rather than abandoned.

Two further cautions belong here. First, restoration: the third line's "for the king" is mostly reconstructed, and the town name as published required a restored letter too. A reader should know how much of a three-line inscription is actually on the clay. Second, the headline claim. "The first mention of Bethlehem outside the Bible" was the framing of the announcement, and it may well be right — but Bethlehem has long been proposed as the Bit-Ninurta of one of the fourteenth-century Amarna letters from the king of Jerusalem, and that reading is argued rather than dead. Several rival readings of the same sign have been proposed. This app therefore says the bulla may carry the earliest extra-biblical mention of Bethlehem, and does not say that it certainly does.

Scripture references

• Micah 5:2 — Bethlehem Ephrathah, small among the clans of Judah — written in this bulla's own century
• 1 Samuel 16:1 — Samuel sent to Jesse the Bethlehemite
• Ruth 1:1 — The famine that sends a Bethlehem family to Moab
• Matthew 2:1 — Jesus born in Bethlehem of Judea — seven centuries after this tax docket

Sources

• ScholarshipR. Reich, "A fiscal bulla from the City of David, Jerusalem" — Ronny Reich, University of Haifa — the excavator's own publication · Israel Exploration Journal 62/2 (2012), 200-205. The linked page is the university's own record and carries the full abstract; the article itself is print onlySupports: The measurements, the find circumstances, the wording "in association with pottery sherds of the eighth-seventh centuries BCE," and the point that almost all comparable fiscal bullae are unprovenanced
• Holding institutionIsrael Antiquities Authority announcement of the Bethlehem bulla, 23 May 2012 — Israel Antiquities Authority, reproduced in full by T. Bolen at BiblePlaces · Carries the three-line reading with the Hebrew, E. Shukron's quoted interpretation, and Bolen's own caution that too much can be made of the discoverySupports: The reading, the sifting, and Shukron's list of possible kings
• ScholarshipG. Athas, "A New Seal that DOES NOT refer to Bethlehem" — George Athas, Moore Theological College, Sydney · 24 May 2012 — the letter-by-letter objection from the published photographSupports: The palaeographic challenge to the reading of the second register
• ScholarshipG. Athas, "More on the so-called 'Bethlehem' Bulla" — George Athas, reporting S. Ahituv's direct examination · 25 May 2012 — Ahituv reads yod rather than bet and het rather than he, giving byt lhm; Athas offers to retract, subject to further independent inspectionSupports: The confirmation of the reading on autopsy and the conditional nature of the withdrawal

Further reading

• BiblePlaces: the Israel Antiquities Authority announcement in full
• G. Athas: more on the so-called Bethlehem bulla

Reflect

The first time Bethlehem's name shows up outside the Bible, it is on a tax receipt. What ordinary paperwork of your life is quietly the setting for something you cannot see yet?