Bulla of Baruch son of Neriah

A bulla is a lump of clay pressed with a seal to close a papyrus document. In 1978 Nahman Avigad published a bulla from a group of some 250 that had surfaced on the antiquities market in the 1970s. It reads in Hebrew letters "Belonging to Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe." Berekhyahu is the full form of the name Baruch and Neriyahu of Neriah, so the seal seemed to belong to Jeremiah's scribe (Jeremiah 36:4). The bulla was bought by the collector Reuben Hecht; a second impression of the same seal, with what was taken for a fingerprint on its edge, appeared in the collection of Shlomo Moussaieff and was published in 1996.

Because neither piece comes from a controlled excavation, their authenticity has been questioned: in 2014 Yuval Goren and Eran Arie, after examining the clay and the impressions, concluded that both are probably modern forgeries, while other scholars still accept them. Excavated bullae of Jeremiah's time, such as that of Gemaryahu son of Shaphan from the City of David, show that such seals did exist.