In 2009, Eilat Mazar's Hebrew University expedition was wet-sifting the dump material from a refuse layer near the Ophel — the saddle of bedrock running from the City of David up to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The dump dated to the late seventh century BC. Among hundreds of small finds, one piece changed the find: a small oblong bulla, thirteen millimeters long, oxidized clay baked hard, with a clear palaeo-Hebrew inscription running across two lines: "Belonging to Hezekiah son of Ahaz, king of Judah" (LMLK ḤZQYHW BN AḤZ MLK YHDH). At the center of the impression, between the two lines of text, a winged sun-disk hovers, flanked by two ankh symbols. This is the first seal impression of a Davidic king ever recovered in a controlled archaeological excavation. Earlier examples had circulated through the antiquities market, but the Ophel bulla came out of the ground in situ, witnessed and documented. The figure named is the Hezekiah of 2 Kings 18–20, 2 Chronicles 29–32, and Isaiah 36–39 — the king who hosted the prophet Isaiah, paid tribute to Sennacherib in 701 BC, and saw the Assyrian camp shattered overnight outside Jerusalem's walls. The iconography is unusual for a Judean royal seal. The winged sun-disk and ankh are Egyptian and Assyrian symbols, not native Israelite ones. The most plausible reading is that the bulla dates from earlier in Hezekiah's reign — before the Assyrian crisis pushed him toward the iconoclastic reforms recorded in 2 Kings 18:4 — when the Judean court was still drawing freely on regional royal vocabulary. It is a small artifact preserving a moment of political theology in transition: a king named in Scripture, about to become the king Scripture remembers. The bulla is on permanent display at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Sources: Eilat Mazar, "Discovery of a Bulla of Hezekiah, King of Judah, in the Ophel Excavations" (Biblical Archaeology Review 41, 2015); Robert Deutsch, Biblical Period Personal Seals in the Shlomo Moussaieff Collection (Archaeological Center Publication, 2003); Nahman Avigad and Benjamin Sass, Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals (Israel Academy, 1997); 2 Kings 18–20.
The Ophel bulla provides the first archaeologically secure seal impression of any Davidic king, anchoring the biblical figure of Hezekiah — named across 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and Isaiah — in datable, excavated material. Its iconography also opens direct questions about Judean royal ideology during the late eighth century BC.