Pashhur ben Immer Seal

The bulla inscribed with the name Pashhur ben Immer entered scholarly attention as part of the corpus of Hebrew seal impressions studied in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Like numerous bullae from this period, it surfaced through the antiquities market rather than a controlled excavation, a circumstance that complicates its precise provenance. It belongs to a broad archive of clay seal impressions that paleographers and epigraphers, including Nahman Avigad and Robert Deutsch, have assigned to the late Iron Age IIB–IIC horizon, roughly the late seventh to early sixth centuries BC, on the basis of letter forms consistent with pre-exilic Hebrew script. The bulla is a small, fired clay impression bearing a two-line Hebrew inscription reading "Pashhur ben Immer." Its physical form is typical of administrative seals from monarchic Judah: an oval or circular clay pellet originally attached to a papyrus document or container. The name Pashhur appears in Jeremiah 20:1–6, where Pashhur son of Immer is identified as the chief officer of the Jerusalem Temple who had Jeremiah beaten and placed in stocks near the Benjamin Gate. The same priestly family name recurs in Jeremiah 21:1 and Jeremiah 38:1, indicating that it represented an established Temple administrative lineage active during the final decades of the Judahite monarchy. For biblical scholarship, the bulla is significant because it attests the existence of the Immer priestly family as a real institutional presence in late monarchic Jerusalem, consistent with the administrative role the text ascribes to Pashhur. It corroborates the broader picture of Temple bureaucracy reflected in Jeremiah and aligns with epigraphic evidence for the same period recovered from the City of David and Lachish. The seal thus situates the Jeremiah narrative within a documented socio-administrative context rather than a purely literary framework. **Sources:** Nahman Avigad and Benjamin Sass, *Corpus of West Semitic Stamp Seals* (Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1997); Robert Deutsch, *Biblical Period Hebrew Bullae: The Josef Chaim Kaufman Collection* (Archaeological Center Publications, 2003); Jeremiah 20:1–6; Jeremiah 38:1.