Nathan-Melech Bulla

An Administrative Building, and a Careful Announcement

The bulla was found in October 2018 in the Givati Parking Lot excavation in the City of David, a dig run jointly by Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority under Yuval Gadot and Yiftah Shalev. Its context is a large public building of the First Temple period, built of finely cut ashlar with a polished plaster floor, and buried under stone debris, burnt beams and charred pottery from the Babylonian destruction of 586 BC. Press coverage of two long-serving team members, Sveta Pnik and Ayyala Rodan, credits them with the find of the bulla and of a companion agate seal, though the accounts differ on which of them found which. The epigrapher who read and published it is Anat Mendel-Geberovich.

The reading is not in dispute, which in this section is worth saying out loud. Two registers, every letter clear: lntnmlk, "belonging to Nathan-Melech," and ʿbd hmlk, "servant of the king." There is no imagery — an aniconic seal, the normal Judahite style after the eighth century. C. Rollston, who dates the script to roughly 675-625 BC on the shapes of the nun, lamed and kaf, went out of his way to praise the excavators and the epigrapher for the sobriety of their public statements, calling it a model for the field.

Servant of the King

The title is the interesting half. ʿbd hmlk does not mean "slave of the king" in this usage; it is the designation of a senior royal official, and it is well attested. A seal from Tomb 19 at Tell en-Nasbeh reads "belonging to Yaʾazanyahu, servant of the king." Lachish Ostracon 3 refers to a Tobiyahu, servant of the king. The Megiddo seal in this section names Shema as servant of Jeroboam, using the same formula with the king's own name in place of the title. So the bulla is not a private signet; it is the working seal of a man near the top of Judah's administration, found in the building where such men worked.

The name itself is the rarest thing about it. Nathan-Melech means "the King has given," with "King" functioning as a way of referring to God, exactly as other Judahite names of the same shape use El or the divine name instead. In the whole Hebrew Bible it belongs to exactly one person: the official at whose chamber Josiah found the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun, in 2 Kings 23:11. That is a single attestation, in the reign of a king whose dates sit squarely inside the palaeographic range of the script.

How Much Weight the Match Will Take

Four things converge here and it is worth naming them separately, because the strength of the case is exactly the sum of them and no more. The name is rare rather than common. The date of the script matches the reign of Josiah. The archaeological context is a royal administrative building in Jerusalem. And both the biblical figure and the seal's owner carry a royal title. Rollston's own assessment is that this makes it probable, indeed most likely, that they are the same man — and that is the assessment this app follows.

But the identification is not certain, and Rollston says why in the same breath. Neither the Bible nor the bulla supplies a patronymic, which is the ordinary way an ancient identification is nailed down. And the two titles are not actually the same word: 2 Kings 23:11 calls the biblical Nathan-Melech a saris — a royal attendant, or possibly a eunuch — while the bulla says servant of the king. It is entirely reasonable that one man held or rose to both, and equally possible that the seal belonged to a son or grandson of the same name, since Judahite families reused names across generations. Certitude, as Rollston puts it, remains just beyond reach.

The people who found it said the same thing in their own words at the time. Mendel-Geberovich's published statement was that it is not possible to determine with complete certainty that the Nathan-Melech of the Bible owned the seal, and that it is equally impossible to ignore the details linking them. She also made an argument in the object's favour that is easy to miss: the man is named without any lineage at all, which suggests he was well enough known that nobody needed it.

The honest form of the claim, then, is this: a high official of Josiah's Jerusalem, bearing a name attested only once in Scripture, sealed documents in a building that burned when the city fell — and he is very probably the man of 2 Kings 23:11. Not certainly. Very probably. That distinction is not pedantry; it is the difference between a claim that survives contact with an epigrapher and one that does not.

Scripture references

• 2 Kings 23:11 — Josiah removes the horses of the sun by the room of Nathan Melech the officer
• 2 Kings 22:12 — Another royal servant of the same court, in the same reform narrative
• 2 Kings 23:4 — The scope of Josiah's purge of the temple
• 2 Kings 25:9 — The burning of Jerusalem in 586 BC — the destruction layer this bulla was found in

Sources

• ScholarshipC. Rollston, "The Bible, a New Hebrew Inscription from Jerusalem, and a High Official of Judah" — Christopher Rollston, George Washington University · Rollston Epigraphy, 1 April 2019. Served over plain httpSupports: The reading, the palaeographic date, the meaning of the title, and the careful statement of how probable the identification is
• Holding institution"Who Was 'Natan-Melech' the King's Servant?" — The City of David, reporting the Israel Antiquities Authority and Tel Aviv University excavation · Names Yuval Gadot and Yiftah Shalev as directors and Anat Mendel-Geberovich as the epigrapher, describes the building and its destruction debris, and carries her statement of the uncertainty in fullSupports: The excavation, the building, the reading, and the excavators' own hedge about the identification
• ScholarshipA. Mendel-Geberovich, Y. Shalev, E. Bocher, N. Shalom and Y. Gadot, "A Newly Discovered Personal Seal and Bulla from the Excavations of the Giv'ati Parking Lot, Jerusalem" — Anat Mendel-Geberovich and colleagues, Hebrew University, the Israel Antiquities Authority and Tel Aviv University · Israel Exploration Journal 69/2 (2019), 154-174 — the formal publication. Available only through hosts that refuse automated requests, so no link is given, and the page range is as cited in the secondary literature · paywalledSupports: The formal publication of the bulla and the companion seal
• Reference"Two tiny First Temple inscriptions vastly enlarge picture of ancient Jerusalem" — The Times of Israel, March 2019 · The only traced source naming individual team members in connection with the findSupports: The names Sveta Pnik and Ayyala Rodan

Further reading

• Rollston Epigraphy: the Bible, a new Hebrew inscription from Jerusalem, and a high official of Judah

Reflect

Nathan-Melech appears in one verse of the Bible, as a room next to a gate. What would it mean to be faithful in a role nobody will remember the details of?