The bulla bearing the inscription 'belonging to Azaliah son of Hilkiah' entered scholarly discussion through West Semitic epigraphic studies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries AD. Like many Judahite administrative bullae, it surfaced outside a controlled excavation context, having passed through the antiquities market before being examined and published by epigraphers working within the Israel Antiquities Authority framework. Its clay matrix, seal impression characteristics, and paleo-Hebrew script were assessed as consistent with late Iron Age IIB–IIC Judahite administrative practice, placing it broadly in the late eighth to early sixth centuries BC. The bulla is a small lentoid clay disc, typical of Judahite administrative seals used to secure papyrus documents. Its two-line paleo-Hebrew inscription reads 'lʾzlyhw bn ḥlqyhw' — 'belonging to Azalyahu son of Hilqiyahu' — following the standard onomastic formula of Judahite personal seals. The script and iconographic absence of figural decoration align with other late monarchic-period Judahite seals. The names correspond precisely to those recorded in 2 Kings 22:3, where Shaphan son of Azaliah son of Meshullam is identified as the royal scribe dispatched by Josiah to the Temple treasurer Hilkiah during the building renovations of approximately 621 BC. The artifact's significance lies in its prosopographic contribution to the study of Judah's late monarchic administration. The family of Shaphan — son of Azaliah, grandson of Meshullam — appears repeatedly in texts surrounding Josiah's reform and the subsequent Babylonian period, including Jeremiah 26 and 36. A seal impression bearing the name of Shaphan's father provides rare epigraphic corroboration of a named biblical official one generation removed from the literary record, reinforcing the historical plausibility of the scribal lineage the biblical text preserves. Scholars of Judahite epigraphy and prosopography continue to include this bulla in synthetic catalogues of Iron Age Hebrew seals. **Sources:** Nahman Avigad and Benjamin Sass, *Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals* (Israel Exploration Society, 1997); Robert Deutsch, *Biblical Period Hebrew Bullae: The Josef Chaim Kaufman Collection* (Archaeological Center Publication, 2003); Lester Grabbe, *Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?* (T&T Clark, 2007); 2 Kings 22:3–8.
This bulla directly attests the personal name Azaliah son of Hilkiah, the father of Shaphan, connecting prosopographically to the bureaucratic family central to Josiah's reform and the discovery of the Book of the Law around 621 BC.