The Tablet That Sat Unpublished

Michael Jursa, a University of Vienna associate professor, found something in a clay tablet that had never been published. One name and one title looked very familiar.

Scripture: All the princes of the king of Babylon came in, and sat in the middle gate, Nergal Sharezer, Samgarnebo, Sarsechim, Rabsaris, Nergal Sharezer, Rabmag, with all the rest of the princes of the king of Babylon.

The verse belongs to the siege of Jerusalem. Nebuchadnezzar's army came in Zedekiah's ninth year, a breach was made in his eleventh, and the verse then names Babylon's officials.

The tablet is dated to about 595 BC, just eight years before those events.

It is a small clay tablet, written in cuneiform, a script of wedge-shaped marks. It refers to an official at the court of Nebuchadnezzar the Second.

Archaeologists unearthed it in the 1870s at Sippar, an ancient Babylonian city southwest of modern Baghdad. The sources differ on the exact distance. It came from the archive of a large sun-worship temple. The diggers' names aren't recorded in this account.

The British Museum acquired it in 1920, and it stayed in storage, unpublished. Today it is still in the museum's collection, which is where Jursa recognised its link to the Bible.

Jursa noted that the name and the title, rab ša-rēši, which literally means "chief eunuch" and is sometimes translated "chief officer", closely matched the Hebrew text of Jeremiah. He added three points: the name is rare, the rank was high, and the dates are close.

Scripture: Jursa judged it almost certain they are the same man. That is strong, but it is still an identification built on a name, a rank and a date.

What it shows is an official of that name and rank at Nebuchadnezzar's court, which Jursa judges almost certainly the biblical figure. It predates the siege and records an everyday temple payment, so it speaks to the man, not to Jerusalem's fall.

One more wrinkle. Translators have divided the verse's names in different ways, from two to eight. Josephus records them differently again.

A small tablet, left unpublished for decades, now offers a quiet link to a named official in Jeremiah. Follow the page for more finds from beneath the Bible. And may the Lord Jesus Christ be with you today.