In 1986, Nahman Avigad of Hebrew University published a small clay bulla bearing three lines of palaeo-Hebrew script: "Belonging to Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe." The bulla had surfaced through the antiquities market rather than from a controlled excavation, but the inscription was striking. The names match — exactly, including the divine theophoric ending in -yahu — the figure of Baruch son of Neriah, the scribe who in Jeremiah 36:4 takes Jeremiah's dictation and reads the resulting scroll aloud in the Temple court, and who in Jeremiah 32:12 witnesses Jeremiah's purchase of the field at Anathoth. A second bulla, said to bear a fingerprint impression alongside the same inscription, surfaced in 1996 in the Moussaieff collection. For two decades the Berekhyahu bullae stood as one of the closest prosopographic links between a recovered seal impression and a named biblical figure. Then in 2014 Yuval Goren and Eran Arie published a microscopic patina analysis in the Israel Exploration Journal arguing that both bullae are modern forgeries — that the surface chemistry of the clay is inconsistent with genuine Iron Age weathering and matches patterns produced by recent fabrication. Robert Deutsch and André Lemaire have contested the analysis, defending the bullae as authentic. The forgery question remains genuinely open. Neither side has been able to close it. The provenance gap — neither bulla was recovered from a stratified excavation — means there is no archaeological context to anchor the patina either way, and the debate now turns on competing interpretations of the same surface chemistry. Until a Berekhyahu bulla turns up in a controlled dig, the artifacts have to be cited with the dispute attached. The first bulla is held at the Israel Museum; the second remains in the contested Moussaieff private collection. Sources: Nahman Avigad, Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Jeremiah (Israel Exploration Society, 1986); Yuval Goren and Eran Arie, "The Authenticity of the Bullae of Berekhyahu Son of Neriyahu the Scribe" (Israel Exploration Journal 64, 2014); Robert Deutsch, "Tracking Down Shebnayahu, Servant of the King" (Biblical Archaeology Review 35, 2009); André Lemaire, response in Biblical Archaeology Review 41 (2015); Jeremiah 32:12, 36:4.
If authentic, the Berekhyahu bulla offers the only recovered seal impression directly naming a biblical figure — Baruch ben Neriah, Jeremiah's scribe — and would constitute rare prosopographic confirmation of a named individual from the late seventh-century BC Judahite scribal administration. The unresolved forgery debate critically qualifies that significance.