Biblical Period Hebrew Bullae. The Josef Chaim Kaufman Collection

Many scholars will find Mr. Kaufman's collection of biblical period Hebrew bullae, of great scientific importance. For several years the author had the privilege of studying hundreds of items in his collection and of publishing some of them in several books. Artifacts such as inscribed vessels, arrowheads, ostraca, weights, jar handles, seals and bullae have been published since 1994 in four books: 'Forty New Ancient West Semitic Inscriptions', 'New Epigraphic Evidence from the biblical Period', 'Windows to the Past' and 'Epigraphic News' (Deutsch and Heltzer 1994, 1995, 1997 and 1999). Most recently an important weight from his collection was also published in the Israel Numismatic Journal: 'A Lead Weight of Hadrian: The Prototype for the Bar-Kokhba Weights' (Deutsch 2002). Mr Kaufman's collection of Hebrew bullae presented in this book is the largest and the most important to be published to date. The collection consists of 516 bullae, all Hebrew except for nos. 89 and 419. They were impressed by 421 different seals and there are 95 duplicates. Two seals are also presented. The collection contains 6 royal bullae, a royal bulla without the title and a royal bulla without the name of the king; 50 bullae of royal officials are divided between 2 commanders of the army, 5 servants of Ahaz, 20 servants of Hezekiah (including 9 duplicates), 9 servants of the king, 5 sons of the king, one who is over the house, a chief officer ngd, a governor and 5 governors of the city; also included is a bulla of a priest. Seals and bullae of women are rare, but 7 bullae are presented, 6 of wives (including 4 duplicates) and one of a daughter. 13 fiscal bullae are also present in the collection. The remaining 343 bullae are of untitled men (including 78 duplicates). Two anepigraphic bullae are also included. Out of the 516 bullae, only 26 were previously published, so the majority, 491, are published here for the first time. In fact, this collection almost doubles the corpus of Hebrew bullae published to date. The collection is to be dated mainly to the second half of the 8th and to the 7th century B.C.E. The bullae datable with certainty are the royal bullae of Hezekiah and of the royal officials of Hoshea, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. The earlier bullae in the collection should be those of the servants of Ahaz, the king of Judah, who ruled from 742/1 to 726 B.C.E,. Hoshea, the last king of Israel, who ruled from 732/1 to 722 B.C.E,. and Hezekiah, who ruled in Judah from 726 to 697/6 B.C.E. The importance of the datable bullae is self evident. The letters will serve as reliable chronological pegs for the study of Hebrew paleography and the designs offer valuable additional material for the study of Hebrew iconography. The question of authenticity Despite the fact that there is no reason whatsoever to doubt the genuineness of the bullae, we are obliged to question their authenticity, simply because they were acquired from licensed antiquities dealers and not uncovered in controlled archaeological excavations. This topic has been raised in the past by Nahman Avigad in his book "Hebrew Bullae from the Time of Jeremiah" in which he published a hoard of 255 Hebrew bullae with no certain provenance, and by the author in his book "Messages from the Past" in which is presented an additional hoard of 109 bullae from the Shlomo Moussaieff collection. All 516 bullae in this collection were examined individually by the author under a powerful microscope and many phenomena which argue for their authenticity were observed. Weather damage was detected on the surfaces, on the edges, in the cracks and on fractured surfaces. Most important, crystals of different shapes and forms are present. These were growing on the surface of the clay during ca. 2700 years, as well from the inside outwards, causing cracks and breaks to the surfaces. Such phenomena are not observed on recently damaged a