Shema Seal

Found at Megiddo, Sent to Istanbul, Gone

G. Schumacher, a German-American engineer and architect working for the Deutscher Palästina-Verein, dug at Tell el-Mutesellim — Megiddo — between 1903 and 1905. In 1904 the excavation produced an unpierced scaraboid seal of jasper, about 37 by 27 by 17 millimetres, which is unusually large for an Israelite seal. On it a lion roars, and around it runs a two-part inscription: lšmʿ / ʿbd yrbʿm, "belonging to Shema, servant of Jeroboam."

Then it disappeared. Schumacher gave the seal to the Ottoman Sultan and it went to Istanbul, and it is no longer in the Topkapi collection. A family tradition, recorded when Schumacher's daughter spoke to an Israeli archaeologist in 1966, says her father was told it had been removed from the museum and placed in Abdul Hamid II's tomb among objects representing the provinces of the empire — but that is second-hand testimony taken down more than sixty years after the fact, and no documentary record of the disposition has been traced. What is certain is that the original is lost. Every study of it since has worked from photographs, plaster casts and a bronze replica Schumacher had made before he sent it away.

The findspot is not secure either. Different accounts place it in a courtyard near the northern wall, near the southern gatehouse, or in an excavation dump, and D. Ussishkin, who restudied the object and its context, called the stratigraphic situation ambiguous. Recording standards in 1904 were not what they later became. The date of the seal rests on the shapes of its letters and on the style of the lion, not on the layer it came out of.

Whose Servant, and Which Jeroboam

The title is the same formula that turns up on the Nathan-Melech bulla in this section: ʿbd, servant, used not of a slave but of a senior official, with the king's own name in place of the generic "the king." Shema was somebody's minister. He is also, and this is worth stating plainly because popular lists get it wrong, not a figure in the Bible. No Shema servant of Jeroboam appears in Scripture. So this object does not identify a biblical person. What it does is attest a biblical king, indirectly, by naming the man who worked for him.

Which king is a real question. The great majority read it as Jeroboam II, who ruled the northern kingdom in the first half of the eighth century BC — the reign Amos and Hosea prophesied into, and a period of northern wealth that a seal this fine would suit. The dating is palaeographic and iconographic. A minority have argued for Jeroboam I, the king who split the kingdom after Solomon; S. Yeivin and G. W. Ahlström are named in the literature as holding that view, though their arguments have not been read for this article and are reported here rather than assessed. Ussishkin's own contribution complicates it from another direction: he associated the seal with a gatehouse of a stratum conventionally dated earlier than the eighth century, which is precisely why he called the context ambiguous and why the palaeography, not the stratum, carries the consensus.

The Seal Is Fine. The Other Object Is Not.

There is no dispute about the authenticity of the Megiddo seal. It was excavated, drawn, cast and published in 1904 and after, and nobody has argued it was faked. Its honest limit is simply that the thing itself is gone: an object studied only through copies cannot be re-examined, cannot be tested, and cannot answer a new question. That is a permanent loss, and it is a reminder of what changed in archaeology between 1904 and now.

The more important warning concerns a second object that shares the same inscription and is constantly confused with the first. Around 1980 a scholar bought a small clay bulla — roughly 23 by 19 millimetres — at a Bedouin market in Beersheba for the price of a coffee. It bears the same words and the same lion. He assumed at the time that it was a modern forgery copied from the famous seal, which by then was on an Israeli coin. In 2023 a team led by S. Ahituv published laboratory work in the journal Tel Aviv arguing for authenticity: petrography pointing to Galilee and Golan clays, electron microscopy finding no modern materials, and isotopic analysis of the patina consistent with natural formation. Y. Goren's summary was that you cannot prove authenticity, only forgery, and that this passes the tests.

It has not settled. S. Munger noticed that the seal and the bulla share an identical small chip beneath the lion — which could be an ancient defect faithfully reproduced, or could be exactly what a forger copying a published photograph would reproduce. C. Rollston's objection is more general and applies to the whole method: laboratory testing cannot demonstrate authenticity, since a sufficiently good forgery would pass, and the inscription here is too poorly preserved for the palaeographic analysis where forgers usually give themselves away. In 2024 R. Deutsch, A. Lemaire, G. Barkay, P. van der Veen and D. Itzhak published an argument that the bulla is a forgery outright.

The rule this app follows is simple. The Megiddo seal is excavated and usable. The Beersheba bulla is unprovenanced, actively disputed as of 2024, and is not used here as evidence of anything. Where a popular article cites "the Shema bulla" for the reign of Jeroboam II, check which object it means.

Scripture references

• 2 Kings 14:23 — Jeroboam son of Joash reigns in Samaria forty-one years — the king most read on this seal
• Amos 7:10 — Amaziah of Bethel reports Amos to Jeroboam king of Israel
• 1 Kings 12:20 — The other Jeroboam, made king over all Israel after the split
• 2 Kings 22:12 — "The king's servant" as a court title in Judah, the same formula this seal uses

Sources

• ScholarshipD. Ussishkin, "Gate 1567 at Megiddo and the Seal of Shema, Servant of Jeroboam" — David Ussishkin, Tel Aviv University · In M. D. Coogan et al. (eds.), Scripture and Other Artifacts: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Honor of Philip J. King (Louisville, 1994), pages 410-428. Print only; the page range is as cited in the secondary literatureSupports: The physical description of the seal and the judgement that its stratigraphic context is ambiguous
• Holding institutionG. Schumacher, Tell el-Mutesellim I: Fundbericht — Gottlieb Schumacher for the Deutscher Palastina-Verein - the excavating body's own report · Leipzig, 1908. The excavation report of the 1903-1905 campaign that produced the seal, published four years after the original had left the country. Print onlySupports: The 1904 find and the excavation that produced it
• Reference"Bulla of 'Servant of Jeroboam'" — Biblical Archaeology Society · Covers the 1904 seal, its loss, the Beersheba bulla, the 2023 laboratory study and C. Rollston's objection that such tests cannot demonstrate authenticitySupports: The loss of the original, the surviving replica, and Rollston's methodological objection
• Reference"Fake seal impression of biblical king Jeroboam is authentic, new study says" — Haaretz, 18 December 2023, reporting the study by S. Ahituv and colleagues · Gives the Topkapi disappearance, the surviving photographs, plaster casts and bronze replica, the bulla's 23 x 19 mm size, the battery of tests, Y. Goren's summary and S. Munger's identical-chip objectionSupports: The fate of the original and the state of the argument over the Beersheba bulla
• ScholarshipS. Ahituv, Y. Goren and colleagues, on the authenticity of the Shema bulla — Shmuel Ahituv, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and Yuval Goren · Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University (2023). The publisher refuses automated requests, so no link is given · paywalledSupports: The 2023 petrographic, microscopic and isotopic case for the bulla's authenticity
• EncyclopediaShema seal — Wikipedia · Records the original's location as unknown and the Beersheba bulla as held at the Rockefeller Museum, JerusalemSupports: General orientation and the present whereabouts of the disputed bulla

Further reading

• Biblical Archaeology Society: the bulla of the servant of Jeroboam

Reflect

The most famous Israelite seal ever found was given away as a gift and lost within a lifetime. What are you holding that you assume will still be there?