Isaiah Bulla

Ten Feet from a King

The bulla was excavated in 2009 by E. Mazar's Ophel expedition, from Iron Age material the excavators describe as undisturbed, outside the south-eastern wall of a structure they call the royal bakery, at the foot of the southern wall of Temple Mount. Like the Hezekiah bulla it was not spotted in the trench; it came out of wet-sifted earth. And it was found roughly three metres from where the Hezekiah bulla had come out of the same operation — close enough that the two objects plausibly belonged to the same administrative rubbish.

Nine years passed before it was published. The editio princeps was an article by E. Mazar, released online on 21 February 2018 and printed in a special double issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (March/April-May/June 2018) at pages 65-73; its title asked whether the bulla carried the prophet's signature, with a question mark. The press coverage the following morning was, with few exceptions, considerably more confident than the article it was reporting.

What Is Legible, and What Is Restored

The bulla has three registers and the top of it is broken away. The first register preserves no letters at all, only part of an image, which Mazar identifies as a grazing doe — a motif of blessing on seals of this period, and a sign that the owner was somebody of standing. The second register reads L-yšʿyh[w] — "belonging to Yeshaʿyahu," the Hebrew name rendered in English as Isaiah, with the final letter of the divine element restored. The third register preserves three letters and no more: nun, bet, yod. That is nby.

In Hebrew the word for prophet is nbʾ — nun, bet, aleph. Restore an aleph at the end of nby and you have a spelling of "prophet." Restore nothing, and you have a three-letter sequence that could be a personal name, a place of origin, or something else again. The left edge of the bulla is damaged exactly there. And reading "prophet" needs two things to be true at once, not one: that the yod is an internal vowel letter, which is rare this early, and that there was room after it for a fourth letter at all. That is why this is an argument and not a reading. E. Mazar's own words in the announcement were careful: "Because the bulla has been slightly damaged at end of the word nvy, it is not known if it originally ended with the Hebrew letter aleph," and she allowed that without it the word could simply be the name Navi. What she did claim without hedging is the first name: "The name of Isaiah, however, is clear."

So the honest statement of what is on this object is short. A man whose name was Yeshaʿyahu sealed something in Jerusalem in the late eighth or early seventh century BC, and after his name stood a word beginning nby. Everything past that sentence is reconstruction, and reconstruction is not evidence.

Why This App Does Not Call It Isaiah's Seal

The most sustained objection came from C. Rollston of George Washington University, who published it within a day of the announcement and expanded it twice that week. His case has four legs. First, the name: the Hebrew root behind "Isaiah" produced names for something like twenty different people in the Bible alone, so a great many men in eighth- and seventh-century Judah were called Yeshaʿyahu or something built on the same root. Second, the missing letter: without an aleph, "prophet" cannot be confirmed, and Rollston does not accept the argument that the letter was simply not written. Third, the article: in the overwhelming majority of biblical occurrences the word "prophet" is definite — "the prophet" — and there is no definite article here. Mazar's drawing proposed restoring one at the end of the previous line; Rollston finds no room for it, and the epigrapher Anat Mendel-Geberovich told him she agrees there is not.

Fourth, and most awkwardly, the yod. If nby is "prophet," the yod is an internal vowel letter, and those are rare in Old Hebrew of this period. The only fully preserved occurrence of the word "prophet" in the Hebrew epigraphic record is Lachish Letter 3, line 20 — and there it is written without the yod and with the definite article, in a letter a century later than this bulla, by which time internal vowel letters were commoner rather than rarer. The single closest comparison we have is spelled the other way, and it is spelled that way at a date when the bulla's spelling should have been easier, not harder. Rollston also lays out several ordinary readings that fit nby perfectly well, in which case the owner would not be a prophet at all.

And the objection is not one man's. Within days, N. Na'aman, P. K. McCarter, K. L. Younger and N. Greene had each independently told Rollston they favoured reading nby as a name or a gentilic — "Nobay," or "the Nobite," from the town of Nob. McCarter's own preference is to take it as a gentilic that had hardened into a personal name, giving the ordinary shape "Isaiah (son of) Nobay" — and since the prophet's father was Amoz, that reading rules him out. The decisive detail is that this reading is not a guess: it is attested on a seal from an excavation at Lachish, catalogued as number 530 in the standard corpus of West Semitic stamp seals, which Rollston singles out as the one parallel that can carry weight because it was dug rather than bought. L. Mykytiuk, separately, is not convinced there is room for a fourth letter after the yod at all. So what faces Mazar's reading is not a single sceptic but a convergence, and it has an excavated object behind it.

Mazar's case for the restoration was not merely hopeful, and this app has an obligation to say what it was. She published the bulla with an interpretive drawing prepared with Reut Livyatan Ben-Arieh, reconstructing the object from its surviving border and proposing that the definite article stood at the end of the register above. She argued from the image: a grazing doe is a blessing motif and marks a seal of consequence. And she argued from context — the bulla lay about three metres from the seal impression of Hezekiah, and Scripture places a prophet named Isaiah at that king's side through the crisis of 701 BC. One further point genuinely helps her, and Rollston himself flags it: there is no bn, "son of," before nby. The word after a name on a seal is normally a patronymic, a gentilic or a title, and the missing bn is what makes a title readable at all. His answer is that bn is sometimes left out before patronymics in the epigraphic record.

Two things should be said in fairness on the other side. The first is that Mazar did not overclaim. Rollston went out of his way to applaud her for it — the operative word in her article, as he put it, is "may" — and her caution is on the record in her own quoted words. The dispute is not about her honesty; it is about whether a restoration can carry a sentence, and it cannot. The second is that nobody disputes that the object is genuine and ancient. It was excavated. The argument here is about reading, not authenticity, and those are different problems with different consequences.

Where this app stands: this is a real eighth- or seventh-century bulla belonging to a man named Yeshaʿyahu, found metres from the seal impression of Hezekiah, in a period when Scripture places a prophet named Isaiah in that king's court. That is a genuinely interesting coincidence and it is worth telling a reader about. It is not proof, it is not a signature, and it is not "Isaiah's seal." A believer's confidence that Isaiah lived and served in Hezekiah's Jerusalem rests on Scripture, not on three surviving letters and a fourth that may never have existed — and pretending otherwise would put the reader's trust on a foundation that a single sentence from an epigrapher can knock over.

Scripture references

• Isaiah 1:1 — Isaiah son of Amoz, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah — note the patronymic the bulla does not have
• Isaiah 37:2 — Hezekiah sends to Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz — the phrase with its definite article
• 2 Kings 19:2 — The same embassy in Kings, placing prophet and king together in Jerusalem
• 2 Kings 20:1 — Isaiah in the palace during Hezekiah's illness

Sources

• Holding institutionE. Mazar, "Is This the Prophet Isaiah's Signature?" — Eilat Mazar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem — the editio princeps · Biblical Archaeology Review, special double issue March/April-May/June 2018, pages 65-73, notes page 92. Published online 21 February 2018. Behind the BAS Library paywall, so no link is given · paywalledSupports: The reading, the find context and Mazar's own statement of the uncertainty
• ScholarshipC. Rollston, "The Putative Bulla of Isaiah the Prophet: Not so Fast" — Christopher Rollston, George Washington University · Rollston Epigraphy, 22 February 2018. Served over plain httpSupports: The four epigraphic objections: the commonness of the name, the missing aleph, the absent article and the anomalous yod
• ScholarshipC. Rollston, "The 'Isaiah Bulla' and the Putative Connection with Biblical Isaiah: 3.0" — Christopher Rollston, George Washington University · Rollston Epigraphy, 26 February 2018 — the fullest version, and the basis of a subsequent print articleSupports: The palaeographic date, Anat Mendel-Geberovich on the space for the article, and the alternative readings of nby
• Reference"An Unprecedented Find: Prophet Isaiah's Seal Mark Possibly Discovered in Jerusalem" — Biblical Archaeology SocietySupports: Mazar's quoted caution about the missing aleph and the possibility of the name Navi
• EncyclopediaIsaiah bulla — WikipediaSupports: General orientation and the summary of the objections

Further reading

• Rollston Epigraphy: "The Putative Bulla of Isaiah the Prophet: Not so Fast"
• Biblical Archaeology Society: Isaiah's signature uncovered in Jerusalem

Reflect

One missing letter is the difference between a curiosity and a headline. Where have you wanted a piece of evidence to say more than it actually says?