In 2005, Eilat Mazar's expedition working in the City of David uncovered a small bulla in burnt destruction debris. The inscription, in palaeo-Hebrew: "Belonging to Yehukal son of Shelemyahu son of Shovi." In 2008, three years later and a few meters away in the same Babylonian destruction layer, the team recovered a second bulla: "Belonging to Gedaliyahu son of Pashhur." Both came out of secure stratigraphy, both from the burn that ended First Temple Jerusalem in 586 BC. The two names appear together in a single sentence of the Hebrew Bible. Jeremiah 38:1 lists four officials who hear Jeremiah preaching surrender to the Babylonians and decide the prophet must die: "Now Shephatiah son of Mattan, and Gedaliah son of Pashhur, and Jucal son of Shelemiah, and Pashhur son of Malchiah." They petition King Zedekiah, win permission, and lower Jeremiah by ropes into the muddy cistern of Malchiah where he sinks into the mire. Two of the four men named in that sentence have now been recovered as clay impressions from the layer of fire their actions could not avert. Yehukal had earlier appeared in Jeremiah 37:3 as one of the officials Zedekiah sent to ask Jeremiah to pray for the city. The pairing is what makes the find extraordinary. Single-name matches between bullae and biblical figures occur with some frequency; double matches from the same biblical sentence, recovered together from the same destruction layer that the prophet predicted, are rare to the point of singularity. Jeremiah's persecutors and his unheeded warning are sealed in the same fire — the clay baked hard by the very Babylonian destruction the prophet had been imprisoned for foretelling. The recovery context further sharpens the identification. The 2005 and 2008 finds came from the same complex on the eastern slope of the City of David that Mazar identified, controversially, as the administrative quarter of late-monarchic Jerusalem. The stratigraphy is undisputed; only the larger architectural attribution has been debated. The bullae themselves require no such argument. They are small, named, and dated by the burn layer in which they sat. Both bullae are held at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Sources: Eilat Mazar, "The Wall that Nehemiah Built" (Biblical Archaeology Review 35, 2009); Eilat Mazar, The Palace of King David: Excavations at the Summit of the City of David (Shoham Academic Research, 2009); Tsvi Schneider, "Six Biblical Signatures" (Biblical Archaeology Review 17, 1991); Jeremiah 37:3, 38:1–6.
These two bullae constitute the only known instance of two individuals named together in a single biblical verse being recovered as physical artifacts from the same destruction layer. They place named officials of Zedekiah's court — Jeremiah's persecutors — directly within the 586 BC Babylonian destruction stratigraphy.